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THE 
FARMER’S CHURCH 


The Century Rural Life Books 
C. J. Garin, Editor 


RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
CHARLES JosIAH GALPIN 


THE WOMAN ON THE FARM 
Mary Merex ATKESoN 


- 


LAND: ITS SOCIAL ECONOMY 
Cuaries Leste STEWART 


THE FARMER’S STANDARD OF 
LIVING 
E. L. Kirxpatrick 


RURAL MUNICIPALITIES 
Tueopore B. Manny 


RURAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 
Cart C. TayLon 


THE FARMER’S TOWN 
J. H. Kors 


THE SUBURBAN TREND 
H. Pavzt Doveunass 


THE FARMER’S CHURCH 
Warren H. Witson 





THE 
FARMER’S CHURCH 


BY 


WARREN HUGH beeen D.D. 


‘*THE CHURCH OF THE OPEN COUNTRY,’” ‘‘THE SECOND 


MISSIONARY ADVENTURE,’ ““THE EVOLUTION OF THE 
COUNTRY COMMUNITY,’ ‘‘QUAKER HILL,’’ ETC, 





THE CENTURY CO. 
New York & London 


Copyright, 1925, by 
THe CentTuRY Co. 


PRINTED IN U. &. A. 


TO 


MARGARET 


THE DAUGHTER 


OF MY COUNTRY CHURCH 


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CHAPTER 


CONTENTS 


THe Farm 

THE FarMer’s CHURCH 

Has 17 a Future? . 

WHat IS RELIGION? 

HOSPITALITY 

WoMEN 

Domestic ANIMALS AND PLANTS . 
NEIGHBORS 

ArT AND PuLay 

“Goop ENOUGH” . 

Rurau SPIRITUALITY 

THE DIFFERENCE . 

Morau VALUES 

Country-CHurRcH FINANCES 

A Worp to BisHops AND SECRETARIES 
To THE PREACHER 

LENGTH OF SERVICE . 

THE LARGER PaRISH . 


THe EFFICIENT CHURCH 


PAGE 


. 110 
. 124 
. 134 
. 144 
. 156 
. 170 
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. 194 
. 207 
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. 248 


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THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


CHAPTER I 


THE FARM 


FARM is a tiny human unit made up of a fam- 
A ily resident upon an area of land averaging in 

the United States about one hundred and forty 
acres. With each decade it grows smaller. On it a 
man and his family group create out of the soil products 
suitable for food, shelter, and clothing for their own use 
and for sale in markets. The American farm was con- 
ceived in the experience of England. There the manor 
had been for five centuries the prevailing example of 
domination of the soil by mankind. The farm expresses 
the independence of our people, their industry, and their 
creative passion. As the American farm does not pay 
and, by comparison with other industrial processes pro- 
ductive of large incomes, never has paid, it would seem 
that the farm is a place of moral and spiritual satisfac- 
tion. Those who live on farms to-day, if they have re- 
sisted the opportunities of the cities, testify to a joy of 
life which cities and towns cannot give. They have 
something of which the popular philosophers do not 
know. 


The component elements of the farm are the house- 
3 


4 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


hold, the barn, and the outbuildings for the shelter of 
cattle and poultry, the fields for the ‘‘stands’’ of corn 
and grain, and the orchard for fruits: these collectively 
constitute one thing in the world. This chapter is not 
the place for technical wisdom as to farm-planning, in 
which the State colleges of agriculture excel: the minister 
who reads it is concerned with the motives which as- 
sociate a man with cattle and provide for the woman 
satisfaction in the care of poultry. He is concerned 
with the joy of the planting and the harvest; for upon 
these the wealth of the world depends. Upon them the 
spiritual structure of the nation is erected. There is 
more wealth produced from the farms than from all 
other sources combined. The mines do not yield in 
metals, nor the sea in food-products, nor the forests in 
timber, one half as much of wealth as the farms yield 
to the treasury of the nation. The soil of the State of 
Georgia is said to produce more in the hands of the 
farmer than all the mines of precious metals that are 
worked under our flag. The soil of mountainous Col- 
orado produces ten times as much as the mines of Col- 
orado. Yes, the farmer’s industry is explained not by 
his compensation, which is less than the pay of a miner; 
but by his spiritual satisfaction, which is like unto that 
of religion. Even in extent throughout the world, reli- 
gious people should not forget that at least two thirds 
and probably three fourths of the persons on earth are 
engaged in agriculture. In the United States about 
thirty per cent. of our population live on farms. There 
is no other industry uniform in its processes that is so 
extensive or exercises the energies of so many. 


THE FARM | 5 


Farming is still a poor man’s occupation. It is the 
best way by which a man without estate may come to 
possess a property of his own. The scholars in agricul- 
ture record year by year the rate at which farm hands 
in the United States become tenants and tenants become 
owners. The fact that the landless man may come to 
have a property and the industrious man may at fifty 
years of age own a title-deed, commends the industry of 
agriculture to the preacher of personal religion. 

The appeal of isolation is but little understood. 
Prosaic philosophers and teachers who dwell in college 
towns have assumed that the American would give up 
the farm generally. They argue this upon the assump- 
tion that many contacts and frequent meetings are dear 
to all men. But some men prefer to live alone. Many 
of those who go to live in towns would prefer the open 
country, and some who live in cities long for the quiet 
of the farm-house, the independence, the slow motions, 
and the leisurely approach to a task. The tranquillity 
of the farm, with its sounds that awaken primitive rec- 
ollections—the sighing of the trees, the crowing of cocks, 
the bleating of sheep—has a place dear in the minds of 
those who inherit, as nearly all of us do, the memory of 
isolation. Farmers study the sky. They know and 
comment upon the movements of the heavenly bodies and 
the change of the seasons. All these are shut out from 
the mind of those who live in cities and tread the paved 
street under artificial light. There is in many men— 
I will not say all—something that cannot be satisfied in 
a crowded place. When we have adjusted ourselves as a 
nation, it may be found that fully half our people will 


6 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


desire the lonely life, in order that they may enjoy the 
sounds of nature and the activities of created things, of 
which God is the evident Maker. We shall not know in 
this generation how many there are who love to be alone, 
but in time the farm will claim its own. 

The farmer is by the remoteness of his abode and by 
his disposition, which idealizes the separate place, aloof 
from the civic process. He does not fear the police- 
man and does not live in expectation of the hand on his 
shoulder. He administers his social life by home-made 
processes. The law is not his life and breath. So- 
clology, not civics, is the science that may understand 
the farmer. Legal science and politics can never pen- 
etrate to the control of the reasons for his action. His 
organizations in the western European countries are 
generally self-governed. They do not ask the consent 
of the law and do not await the inspection of uniformed 
officials. Just as the farmer in the United States be- 
haves without a policeman to prod him, so the codperator 
in Finland or Belgium proceeds with his work in no ex- 
pectation of government help. Even in Prussia be- 
fore 1914 the farmers had secured in their codperatives 
freedom from government interference. The processes 
of agriculture are open to the influences of religion, but 
they do not yield easily to the control of law. It is an 
unsettled question whether lawmakers do the farmer 
more good than harm. The reason is that the range of 
utility of law is narrow and the use of executive power 
is limited in human life; while the activities of the tillers 
of the soil are on the frontiers of life, and in them a 


THE FARM | 7 


man must be guided through a variety of processes by his 
own promptings and by the energies within him. 

In saying this, I do not forget that the champions of 
the farmer are to-day active in promising governmental 
help to those who till the soil; nor do I ignore the nec- 
essary control which cities lay upon the farmer in their 
own interest, by securing the enactment of laws for the 
production of pure milk, and for the protection of the 
consumer from the carelessness or greed of the producer. 
Most of the process of agriculture is still untouched by 
law and should continue free. But every act of the man 
who tills the soil is under the motivation, and may be 
under the immediate direction, of the religious teacher. 
The pastor comes much nearer to the keeper of 
sheep, or to the gardener kneeling between his rows, or 
to the breeder of cattle, than does the lawgiver. 


CHAPTER II 


THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


voices from country churches. Before 1890 men 
had taken the open country for granted. - It was as 
near to us as nature itself. We were used to thinking of 
life in the terms of country life. Our figures of speech, 
our standards of thought were those of country people. 
Our songs and sayings were those which express love 
of riversides, separate houses in the open fields, and 
the life of farm animals. Above all, our religious 
faith expressed itself in rural church forms. It was 
shocking to be told, about 1892, that in sections of New 
England farms were abandoned, churches were closed, 
and moral conditions among country people had fallen 
out of line with the national spirit. We assured our- 
selves that these conditions were ‘‘local’’—with a cer- 
tain fling of resentment at New England for her well- 
known airs of moral superiority. And for a decade we 
forgot it. Yet we did not put the matter out of mind. 
We had some evidence to confirm it. And the voices 
of distress continued at intervals to be heard. 
Three notable papers were published, about the end 
of the nineteenth century, to express the writers’ sense 


of rural decay. President William DeWitt Hyde of 
8 


I: the first years of this century we heard strange 


THE FARMER’S CHURCH 9 


Bowdoin College wrote in 1892, for ‘‘The Forum,’’ on 
‘“‘Impending Paganism in New England’’; the Rev. W. 
L. Hutchins addressed the Connecticut Bible Society 
in a memorable way in 1903, and the Rev. Rollin Lynde 
Hartt wrote, for the ‘‘ Atlantic Monthly,’’ articles on 
the ‘‘New England Hill Towns’’ which created a sen- 
sation. The strength of these utterances was their 
portrayal of social decay, including more than decline 
of church-attendance. The writers appealed to church 
people, but they drove home the accusation by descrip- 
tion of the desolate homes, neglected fields, and degen- 
erate human stock of the towns in which had once lived 
the best type of American citizens. 


The testimony of Mr. Hutchins has every title of respect: 
it was based upon the observation of many years, during which 
it had been his business to go from house to house upon an 
errand that made him watchful of moral conditions; more im- 
portant still, in its utterance there is a note of sharp pain, 
as if a constantly confronted horror had burned his soul. 
His story dwells upon the prevalent ignorance, the inroads 
of vice, the open contempt of marriage, the increase of 
idiocy, the feebleness and backwardness of schools, the neglect 
of the church, the swift lapse into virtual heathenism in whole 
sections once occupied by the best type of Christian manhood. 


These papers awakened a persistent discussion which 
continued until its culmination in the book, from which 
we have just quoted,written in 1906 by the Rev. Wilbert 


1“The Country Town,” Wilbert L. Anderson. Baker & Taylor 
Co. 1906. 


10 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


L. Anderson, a pastor at Amherst, and entitled ‘‘The 
Country Town.’’ This book may be said to have 
brought to a close the first phase of the discussion. 

When this discussion was on, I was pastor of an ideal 
eommunity in the country north of New York City— 
historic, rich in wealth, personality, and idealism, and 
enjoying in a high degree the sincere piety of that time. 
Then the modern social passion was new-born and the 
older piety had not yet lost its illusions. We had no 
foresight of the decay going on in that old community, 
in which, while the church grew, the society died. It 
was my privilege to preach also, for the love of it, 
in a church formerly strong, a full four miles from my 
own at Quaker Hill. On the last mile of my ride to the 
church I passed seven houses in succession in each of 
which dwelt a lonely person, fragment of a broken fam- 
ily: an aged wife in one, her husband in another; a 
half-mile farther on a divorced man given to drink; 
two widows in successive houses; an eccentric hermit 
in a shanty, and a solitary old man. 

Just before reaching the church one passed the 
school where the teacher had, on a day of good attend- 
ance, four pupils. But at the church on a fair day 
I confronted fifty men on one side of the house and as 
many women on the other. We had to build new horse- 
sheds to accommodate the driving-animals during the 
sermon. Yet the broken homes and the empty school- 
house told the story of the community’s decay. Now 
the school-house has long been closed; its windows are 
broken, its door off the hinges. The church is kept 
in repair but never opened and the road itself is almost 


THE FARMER’S CHURCH 11 


closed, choked by the bushes on each side which brush 
the passing vehicle. 

The social forces which shattered family unity, made 
women childless, and drove some to suicide, have in a 
quarter of a century emptied all but nine of the 
thirty-eight houses which were tributary to that con- 
gregation. Five structures have gone down, five have 
for as many years had no tenants, and twenty are the 
summer homes of ‘‘city people.’’ Last winter the great 
snow crushed one long horse-shed; the summer sun and 
wind have stripped from the other the shingles nailed on 
with such mirth at the ‘‘bee,’’ and between them stands 
the church, with locked door and closed blinds. An 
aged man used for years to cut the grass before its 
door, but he has died. The same forces have triumphed 
over the religious unity of Quaker Hill.* For thirty 
years it was a ‘‘one-church community,’’ and now a 
preacher is there only for the summer, to dwell in the 
manse and preach to a dozen summer people in the 
ehurch where in winter their first pastor tried new 
sermons upon the devout attention of a hundred. The 
heart cries out at this decay of a community stricken 
with incurable ills. For in the first chapter of country 
life in the United States the church was the register | 
of social and economic confusion. Its ministers were 
prophets of the agrarian revival. The bad repair of 
its meeting-houses and the dispersal of its congregations 
were the earliest storm-signals of the farmer’s distress 
which the nation heeded. 


2“Quaker Hill, a Sociological Study,” Warren H. Wilson. 
Privately printed. 


- 


12 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


Then came the administration of Theodore Roosevelt 
as President. He was an American indeed, who looked 
backward and forward. In his last year he gave the 
nation The Country Life Commission Report.? At 
once the case of the farmer became a national concern. 
What had before been an academic question was on the 
front page of the daily papers. The agricultural press, 
which had ignored the New England degeneracy, 
poured scorn upon the President’s commission with its 
assertion of common interest on the part of farmers, 
teachers, and ministers. The United States Senate 
printed the report as a document with a number, but, 
as if ashamed of this routine act, Congress refused at- 
tention to recommendations of the report. The com- 
mission has never been discharged. The matter has 
gone out of the hands of Congress. That report was 
addressed, as so much of Mr. Roosevelt’s work, to the 
people of this country rather than to Congress alone. 

Indeed, the first response, so far as known to the 
present writer, was from the Presbyterian Church, by 
which he was employed at that time as a sociological 
specialist. In May of 1909, three months after the 


Roosevelt report appeared, a series of Country Church 


Conferences was projected by Charles Stelzle, which 
carried the discussion of the rural situation through 
the center of the States of Pennsylvania, New York, 
Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Nebraska. We got 
such eager response from church superintendents, pas- 
tors, and educators that the Board of “Home Missions 


3“The Country Life Commission Report.” Sturgis & Walton 
Co., publishers. 


THE FARMER’S CHURCH 13 


felt called on to pursue further the interest in the 
country church; and I was delegated to the task, at 
first informally, but in a year quite definitely, as Su-, 
perintendent of Church and Country Life. The event 
was not without humor, as illustrating the way ‘‘ex- 
perts’’ are made. I had been a city pastor, called into 
national service because of my interest and zeal for the 
benefit the church could render to workingmen. Seized 
upon in this new drive for the farmer’s church, I have 
not. been permitted from that day to this to speak or 
write about anything but the country church. The 
church people had to have an agent who could release 
the dammed-up volume of talk they had in them, and 
they ‘‘specialized’’ me with a vengeance. I have been 
well content except when antagonism between city and 
country has got the floor. The rural situation is a na- 
tional one and owes much to the city leaders and think- 
ers. It has as good right to the use of city facilities and 
city experience as has any other national problem. 
Like railroading, or education, or poverty, it claims ac- 
cess to the resources of the whole country in its times 
of need. Its solution cannot be accomplished, I am 
sure, without the leadership of the city churches. 
Among the surprises of the early day was the intel- 
ligent and eager interest in the churches, manifested 
by the teachers and scientific thinkers employed by 
the Department of Agriculture and by the agricultural 
colleges. For five years we just talked, discussed, or 
propagandized; and everywhere JI met two classes of 
men who had equal zeal for a revival of the country 
church; they were the deans of agriculture and the 


14 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


supervisors of churches. The latter came into the con- 
ferences regardless of their denomination. The former 
displayed an interest made up of blended piety and 
sentiment, stirred by a scientific interest in the church 
as an essential social institution without whose help 
their agrarian reconstruction could not be accomplished. 
Most of these scientists of agriculture were religious 
men, but they helped the church discuss its case re- 
gardless of their allegiance to Catholic or Protestant 
faith. Some of the men with whom for ten years I found 
myself associated most frequently on church and college 
platforms, were devout Catholics. They invited me to 
their meetings for farmers and I solicited their presence 
periodically at meetings in which knowledge of their 
denominational connection would at times have chilled 
their welcome. But we all saw that a great national 
change was at hand, for which the churches should 
provide sanctions. 

Almost as interested were the educators employed 
in superintendence of public schools, of whom for many 
years Philander P. Claxton was the official leader as 
Commissioner of Education. They too were Christian 
men, as arule. They discerned the common interest of 
the church and school in the country. They were ad- 
vocating a national educational reform, in obedience 
to a national spirit. The great report issued by Pres- 
ident Roosevelt had commanded them also to set about 
the teaching of better living in the country. They also 
sought wisdom for the task from the popular dis- 
cussion of it with thinking men and women in the 


THE FARMER’S CHURCH 15 


small town and the city. They looked as we did for the 
farmer to take possession of his institutions and make 
them his own. We agreed in believing that the aroused 
and angry farmer would not prosper economically, nor 
win political victory that would last, until he had 
schools and churches capable of registering his culture 
and transmitting it from one generation to the next. 

But the talk was without substance. Country people 
evidently lacked accurate knowledge regarding their 
education and their religion. Assertions were made 
and repeated but never verified. Contradiction was 
equally weak because it lacked support. There was no 
body of knowledge of rural social life. Indeed, 
there was at that time no knowledge of the economic life 
of farmers and villagers to which discussion could go 
and claim a settlement of disputes. Therefore the ad- 
ministration of church work was dogmatical, assertive, 
and inconclusive. It was for this reason that Dean 
Liberty Hyde Bailey * had been advocating for years the 
survey and measurement of country interests. He de- 
sired to have a body of knowledge about the economic 
and social life of farmers, such as other professions 
already had, upon which the teacher and administrator 
could base his assertions and his policies. 

Therefore we began, one year after the first country- 
life conferences were held by the Presbyterian Board, to 
survey the churches of given areas; first in Pennsylva- 
nia about Huntington, then in Illinois about Spring- 


4“The State and the Farmer,” Liberty Hyde Bailey. Mac- 
millan, 1911. Pp. 81-84. 


16 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


field and Decatur.® It is interesting to record the dis- 
position there was at that time in the hearts of church- 
men to study the actual situation. These surveys were 
made, as is our custom, upon the request of the local 
‘‘chureh court,’’ which in my church is called a presby- 
tery. But when after three months the findings as to the 
condition of country churches were presented to the meet- 
ing of this body, they were received with studied indif- 
ference. Or better, with excited interest and prompt neg- 
lect. But the interest was more than local. Men saw that 
here was a matter of national, not local concern. Other 
regions bespoke surveys of their country churches. The 


5A Rural Survey in Pennsylvania. Presbyterian Board of 
Home Missions. New York, 1910-15. Also the following: 
A Rural Survey in Illinois. 


se oH i" “Arkansas 

A ty “of Marin and Sonoma Counties, California. 
“s as ‘ “Tulare County, California. 

«s i “« “ Tndiana 


‘ . “« -Kentucky. 

i f “Maryland. 

A Canvass of Religious Life and Work in Redwood County, 
Minnesota. 

A Rural Survey in Missouri. 

Ohio Rural Life Survey, Greene and Clermont Counties, 


“ ‘“ 4: $5 Northeastern Ohio. 
es ‘“ 6 cs Southeastern Ohio. 
“ “ “ es Southwestern Ohio. 
‘“ “ se Church Growth and Decline in Ohio. 
‘“ ‘6 « + Country Churches of Distinction. 
A Rural Survey of Lane County, Oregon. 
‘ ‘ 66 in Pennsylvania. 


ty a "e “ Tennessee. 


THE FARMER’S CHURCH 17 


Rev. C. O. Gill® was at the same time surveying a 
county in Vermont, under the sponsorship of Gifford 
Pinchot, who was a member of Mr. Roosevelt’s commis- 
sion. He followed a purely ecclesiastical clue at that 
time, which he later pursued into economic and social 
fields in his Ohio survey. Our Presbyterian contribu- 
tion was poured out in a series of pamphlets which re- 
corded the social and economic structure of the country 
communities of the States named and of Indiana, Ten- 
nessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Oregon, and 
California. It culminated in the Ohio Rural Life Sur- 
vey which was published in 1910 and 1911, showing the 
conditions of country living in thirty-nine of the eighty- 
eight counties of Ohio. Mr. Gill took up this survey 
where we left off and recorded the church and social 
facts of every parish in Ohio, in his book ‘‘Six Thousand 
Country Churches’’* which made of the Buckeye State 
a demonstration of the country church in the United 
States. These studies were novel and sensational in the 
interest they elicited. ‘‘They read like a novel,’’ said a 
Brooklyn pastor. In Ohio a Federation of Churches and 
an annual School for Pastors are now engaged upon the 
teaching and administration of rural churches in the 
light of the body of knowledge in their possession. 

The survey of country churches was too big a matter 
to be accomplished by one denomination. After the 
World War the Interchurch World Movement under- 
took it; and following its collapse the Committee on 

6“The Country Church,” C. O. Gill and Gifford Pinchot. Mac- 
millan. 1919. 


7“Six Thousand Country Churches,” C. O. Gill. Macmillan. 
1920. 


18 ibe THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


Social and Religious Surveys, ‘‘organized to salvage the 
materials’? of the Interchurch, completed the nation- 
wide study of the church in its economic and social 
setting and is publishing the result, in a series of vol- 
umes. It uses the methods first employed in the Penn- 
sylvania survey, but brought down to date and supple- 
mented with the devices of Professors Galpin and Kolb 
for recording community boundaries.® 

All these measurements of religious process add little 
to what the experienced superintendent of church work 
has long known. But they are of use in the enlistment 
of a new type of mind in religious work. It is surely 
worth while to engage the powers of analysis of Her- 
mann N. Morse and the genius for organization of Ed- 
mund de 8. Brunner upon national church interests such 
as concern every congregation in the country, from the 
Catholic parish to the Pentecostal meeting in the school- 
house. Besides, they have given to country religious in- 
terests a statement that can be understood by all, and 
that will be read by a wider circle than that of the presid- 
ing elders of American churches. 

The story of the country-church movement is com- 
pleted by the record of the appointment, by several de- 
nominations, of country-church specialists. The Pres- 
byterian, Methodist Episcopal, Baptist, Congregational- 
ist, Reformed, Disciples, Southern Methodist, and finally 
the Roman Catholic and Protestant Episcopal, have ap- 
pointed superintendents or directors of their work on 


8“The Social Anatomy of a Rural Community,” C. J. Galpin. 
University of Wisconsin Research Bulletin No. 34. “Rural Pri- 
mary Groups,” Kolb. Research Bulletin No. 51. Agr. Exper. 
Station, Madison, Wis. 


THE FARMER’S CHURCH 19 


behalf of their rural congregations. These men, except 
the Baptist and Methodist Episcopal, are still in service. 
They are selected for their educational rather than their 
preaching experience, and three of them were called out 
of educational work. The appointment of denomina- 
tional agents to safeguard the churches in the country 
had, for some observers, a sinister look; it was said to be 
a step backward. The discussion prior to the making 
of surveys brought out that the chief trouble with country 
churches was their denominationalism. Why accentuate 
it by the assignment of one promoter to each sect that 
maintains country churches? There is truth in this ob- 
jection. Church people are still too prone to take com- 
fort to themselves in seeing among the leaders of their 
church work a Director of Country Church Work; they 
too easily believe that such an officer assures the enact- 
ment of a wise policy of administration. Denominational 
specialists in this field, as in any other, may become only 
additional overhead officers. Furthermore, it is in the 
nature of denominationalism to muffle any sounds of 
eriticism that its own members make, by confining the 
discussion to its own precincts. Protestant sects are 
essentially public. They deal with matters in the com- 
munity. As soon as they confine an interest to their 
own precinct they have killed it, because they have 
denied its access to the general public. There is there- 
fore in the appointment of half a score of secretaries 
of country churches by the denominations chiefly 
concerned, a reaction characteristic of the sectarian 
spirit. As soon as the country-church interest became 
general each sect wanted to have a representation. 


20 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


Yet it must be said that these men, because of their 
connections with scholars and their respect for the uni- 
versity opinion, have kept themselves free from secta- 
rian bias. Not one has yet been appointed who could be 
called a church politician. None of them has so far 
used his office for sectarian interest. On the contrary, 
they have maintained close codperation and sympathy 
in the study and promotion of community programs. 
They have solidly supported the survey and report of 
rural church work, out of which has come a body of 
knowledge of the highest value. They have, each in 
his own denomination, held up the standard of subsis- 
tence for country churches—which are the same in all 
divisions of Christendom. It may be questioned whether 
any better way could have been devised at the pres- 
ent time for the leavening of the various sects with the 
doctrine which will be presented in this book. For 
without exception these men agree upon a religious 
program for the country church, the elements of which 
program are the same in all communions. This reli- 
gious program binds the people together. 

It would be too much to say that the country churches 
will reunite Christendom, but it may be that by means 
of this country-church program we shall save the Chris- 
tian religion from extinction at that point at which 
sectarianism threatens to destroy it. For in the coun- 
try community Protestantism has not the room for dif- 
ferentiation it has in the growing cities. Three churches 
in a hamlet of one hundred people, or five in a village 
of a thousand, do effectively shut Christ out. The 


; 


THE FARMER’S CHURCH 21 


eountry-church program of all denominations rebukes 
and ends this delusion. 

The most of the organization thus far described was 
perfected before 1920. In the past five years we have 
had opportunity to try our theories, discuss experi- 
ments, demonstrate our principles. There has been 
time also for the publication of the surveys made. The 
organized country-church departments, which were 
each at first opposed, have been let alone by church con- 
servatives for a while, and they should have by this 
time something to report. They have, indeed, made 
measurable gains, chiefly in the direction of adapting 
the church to its community; of this details will come 
later. It is of greater importance to record here that 
we seem to be approaching the end ofithe period in 
which these specialists have served their time and re- 
joiced in their vision. 

They have indeed rejoiced. "Welcomed by acclaim of 
scholars, intellectuals, special workers in agriculture, 
health, play, social science; admitted to the university 
class room and to the college platform, heard with in- 
terest by learned societies, the country-church ‘‘expert”’ 
has with difficulty maintained his humility. He has 
known only too well that his materials are commonplace, 
his assertions and his program moderate and unsensa- 
tional, his goal hidden even from his own eyes. Yet 
he has been swept into public notice and newspapers 
have welcomed his addresses, cherished his photograph, 
and attended his conferences with the eyes and ears. 
and poised pencil of the reporter. Why all this public 


22 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


acclaim for the country church? Why the seat at the 
guest table, the chair at the center of the platform? 
Why the same phrases from the introducing officer, in 
every State from Connecticut to California? 

And after the acclaim the present quiet days. But 
even in the diminished public interest of this year, 1925, 
the place of the country church is assured in public 
interest. An eye that never sleeps watches it and a- 
waits the development of its future. The ‘‘movement”’ 
of the past thirty years has called into the service 
of country churches a personnel who are enlisted 
for life. Some were there before, but they have now 
a voice and a meaning that give value to what they 
would have attempted. New men have moved into 
rural manses with the purpose of working five years, 
studying one year in a university, and then returning 
to the farmer’s church. Books have appeared, to re- 
cord the names and attainments of these men. They are 
seeing light on their prosaic task. A country ministry 
is appearing such as our fathers did not know 
of, a generation who will be the prophets of new 
religious leadership and thought. 

Yet this new religious feeling and consecration speak 
with no power of command. There is much writing in- 
deed, but it is of the precise, dull prosaic kind that will 
convert no one; it is of the text-book order. We need 
a great voice to arouse and awaken us. A poet or a 
preacher is required, who can make the present gener- 
ation believe in the life of country people, who can 
sing the beauty of the process of creation and shout the 
call to holy living on the land. It may be that he 





THE FARMER’S CHURCH 23 


will be a priest to toll the bell for worship and quiet 
the souls of our people with the calm of God that 
lies on smiling fields. It may be a mystic prophet who 
will stir men with awe of the spirit that moves over 
the tree-tops of the woods between farm-houses. He 
will surely come. And he will be as much greater than 
the men who have prepared for him as the Master 
was greater than the Forerunner. | 

The expectant period of the faith of farmers is em- 
bodied in two devoted men, who have lived, served, 
yet not attained. They are Matthew Brown McNutt 
and Charles M. McConnell. Each has served in a coun- 
try church to which the whole nation looked; each has 
withdrawn from the service, baffled but undiscouraged ; 
each is hopeful, and ready for events that are delayed. 
Mr. MeNutt undertook in 1900 the pastorate of a church ® 
of the old type among a sturdy Illinois population who 
have produced more than one beginning in the agrarian 
revival. In DuPage County, Illinois, the Town and 
Country Young Men’s Christian Association was born 
in 1873 under the leadership of Robert Weidensall; and 
near at hand O. J. Kern began his work which country 
school-teachers cherished in the volume ‘‘ Among Coun- 
try Schools.’’ McNutt took his wife into the country 
near Plainfield and extended from the manse where 
they lived the service of the gospel his predecessors 
had only preached—a ministry of music, recreation, and 
joy. At the end of ten quiet years he had united his 
people in a congregation capable of erecting a build- 


9“Modern Methods in the Country Church,’ M. B. McNutt. 
Presbyterian Board of Home Missions. New York. 


24 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


ing suitable to modern use. It was built without help 
of city or national funds, though the congregation had 
the right to Chicago codperation and national sub- 
sidy. Sister churches in Chicago ignored McNutt’s 
modest plea for aid, and he did not ask Home Missions 
aid. The DuPage building was dedicated free of debt. 

The story of Mr. McNutt’s pastorate, told for the 
first time casually, at a late hour, at a banquet of 
Chicago churchmen who were assembled to welcome a 
prominent city pastor, electrified the men who heard 
it. Probably no one else was so surprised as the 
speaker himself. ‘‘We carried McNutt around the hall 
on our shoulders,’’ said one minister who was present. 
The ovation he then received was but a prelude to the 
journalistic welcome extended to him. He was asked 
to write for farm journals, educational weeklies, socio- 
logical organs; and to speak upon platforms before 
which were assembled audiences to amaze and delight 
any teacher. Within a year he found himself spending 
more than half his time in travel and public propa- 
ganda. He steadfastly refused flattering offers to 
withdraw from the pastorate and go on the lecture or 
teaching platform. 

But in the end, after three years of futile struggle 
to harmonize his new work with the old, Mr. MeNutt 
accepted appointment of his own church and began a 
decade of public speaking. Everywhere he went, tell- 
ing the story of his pastorate at DuPage. He added a 
course of lectures for longer engagements; but his 
hearers demanded of him persistently that he repeat 
to them what he had seen with his own eyes and done 


THE FARMER’S CHURCH > 25 


with his hands among the farmers of the black 
lands of Illinois. He became the advocate of the coun- 
try parson, and the embodiment in himself of the joy: 
and the triumph of the country church. Other men’s 
experience, of discouragements he had lightened and 
victories he had witnessed, became part of his tale. 
He broadened and deepened his philosophy as he saw 
the working of forces before unknown to him or to 
other pastors. He enriched his understanding of the 
particular—about which he was always speakinge—by 
his insight into general conditions and into social-eco- 
nomic forces that attack the church. Mr. McNutt re- 
tired in 1922 to his farm at Wooster, Ohio. 

C. M. McConnell began in a country church in the 
days when it was supposed to be a stepping-stone to a city 
charge. And in due time he stepped up ‘‘to a larger 
work in a city.’’ But he was not contented there. 
In 1914 he demanded and was given service in the 
country, at Lakeville, Ohio, as a ‘‘demonstration pas- 
tor.’’ Here for years he maintained a church to which 
attention was directed by church officials as a model 
enterprise. McConnell was supported effectively as a 
public speaker with an adequate income and assistants 
to supplement his activities, provided by one of the 
national boards of his church, while he tried out meth- 
ods and adapted measures to the needs of country peo- 
ple about which he could talk in his public addresses. 
Equipped with a passionate love of the country and 
a penetrating sympathy for common folk, he became a 
great influence in his own and other churches and a 
popular speaker at farm meetings, a stimulating and 


26 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


provocative teacher. For the past two years Mr. Mc- 
Connell has been in service of enlistment under the 
board that so long maintained him in rural Ohio. He 
has given up his ‘‘demonstration’’ for administrative 
services; but he, like McNutt, awaits with eagerness 
and conviction the outcome of the conflict in which 
he was there engaged. 

Both these men have been denied the privilege of see- 
ing their dreams come true. What they did in the small 
place is still being done in particular places by others, 
but it has not become the rule. The work they set them- 
selves to do was so complex a task and the imitations 
they set going were on so vast a scale that they*must 
needs suffer disappointment. For a time they had to 
withdraw. But their experiences may serve aS Measure 
of the whole movement. They were not theorists who 
could retreat upon general principles. They tried to 
practise a new religious philosophy upon an old men- 
tality. They sewed a new piece on an old garment. They 
put new wine in old bottles. They had to stop. They 
were consistent enough to stop short. One has no reason 
to believe that having seen the reality they have lost 
faith. Rather, they have kept their faith. 

One development of the country-life movement of the 
past thirty years has been the type of church which has 
taken to itself the term ‘‘community church.’’ This 
term, overworked of late, is no more theirs who use it | 
than it is the property of other churches; but they are 
sorely in need of a garment to clothe themselves withal, 
and they cling to this term as a symbol of common ex- 
perience. They prize it the more because they differ 


THE FARMER’S CHURCH 27 


widely in kind. Yet they probably owe their place in 
public attention and their eagerness to tell one another 
about themselves, to the same causes which led to the 
employment of country-church specialists by ten denom- 
inations. It may be that their protest against denom- 
inational exploitation of the country churches has 
driven them to desire a communion with one another. 
They defend themselves behind the term ‘‘community 
church.’’ They have found a champion in David R. 
Piper of Excelsior Springs, Missouri; who has enu- 
merated them and found their number to be 713 in June, 
1923.4° Of these he found only 103 to be denominational. 
The *greater number he declares to be outside sec- 
tarian connection or affiliation, being organized for 
the service of social communities, without religious 
prejudice. 

This is a very significant religious event. It goes out 
to the whole country, being naturally less extended in 
the South. It expresses a passionate conviction and a 
revolt of consecrated men against situations which could 
in no other way be solved. Inasmuch as these churches, 
whose only attachment is local, are conventional in their 
liturgy and imitate the ways of the ordinary Protestant 
church in everything except administrative polity, they 
may be enumerated as an expression of the same forces 
as are at work in the denominations. They practise the 
*‘programs’’ that are advocated in the very denomina- 
tions from which they have withdrawn, so far as these 
schemes of activity have to do with local and neighbor- 
hood interests. They secure freedom from the super- 


' 10See the “Unity Messenger,” published at Butler, Indiana. 


28 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


vision of the superintendent and the bishop. They can 
do as they please in their contributions to missionary 
causes. They carry out the country-life program in 
the advocacy of which the leading denominations have 
united. 

Taken together with the number of churches of 
similar type and purpose in denominational connection, 
these churches which have only the name of ‘*commu- 
nity’’ to distinguish them, constitute a considerable 
advance. Their dispersion throughout the land indi- 
cates a general interest among Americans in the use- 
fulness of religion. This is indeed new. Our religion 
has never before been dominated by utility. Previous 
eenerations declared their convictions to be true. They 
determined their communion with others by common 
Opinion, by obedience to common authority, by alle- 
giance to common masters of the spirit. These churches 
put supreme above all other binding-ties the one 
principle of utility. They make the church to serve. 

It is probably not enough to make a new religious 
sect of, nor is it wholly original. It is prosaic enough 
and characteristic of agrarian minds, the minds of 
Americans, who are practical people. But it scems to 
be the present point of arrest. There we stand. What 
will not work, we leave out. What is of use we retain 
and practise. If only the country churches could be 
awakened to what is beautiful in the teaching of 
Christ! If then they could dare to face again the 
truth and to make the sacrifices truth requires! But 
that may come later. 


CHAPTER III 


HAS IT A FUTURE? 


[= urban population residing outside ineorpo- 
rated places of 2500 or over, has increased in 
the past forty years in the United States from 
28.6 per cent. to 51.4 per cent. of the total population. 
The urban growth has affected the communities of more 
than 8000 population, which may more properly be 
called cities, more than towns and villages of less than 
8000, which are generally dependent upon agriculture. 
Their increase in the forty-year period has been from 285 
in number, constituting 22.7 per cent. of the total 
population, to 924 places with 43.8 per cent. of the total 
population. In other words, the number of people liv- 
ing in places of 8000 population or over has increased 
from 11,365,698 in 1880 to 46,307,640 in 1920. Com- 
munities of less than 8000 population are regarded in 
this book as rural. They contain more than 56 per cent. 
of the population of the country. 

The transformation of the ideals of the nation from 
rural to urban has been even greater than the shifting 
of the population from country to city. The second 
generation of urban Americans is accustomed to the 
ideas of a culture that lives by machinery and has 


forgotten that production is initially a matter of 
29 


30 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


growth. Children who have gone through the public 
schools of a great city and have been employed by 
city firms have a clerical and mechanical turn of mind. 
They do not know what the country is. During youth 
and middle age they never reflect upon the reasons for 
life in the country. The American of thirty-five is 
now a sort to admire all machinery and despise all 
vegetation. In time this may be remedied by reason 
of the mechanical penetration of the country in motor 
trips and summer vacations; at present the motorists 
are a scourge to the country-side. They ravage farmers’ 
fields, take what they please, camp in inviting 
spots, and leave the grassy place of their sojourn pol- 
luted with waste, or the timber lot endangered by a 
smoldering fire. To them the open country is aban- 
doned now and owned by nobody. 

The opinion of clerks and mechanics about the fu- 
ture of the country is all adverse. They ‘‘know only 
what they read in the papers’’—as the humorists Fin- 
ley Peter Dunne and Will Rogers admit on their be- 
half—and the daily papers are published too rapidly 
to catch the rhythm of farm life. Life among beasts 
and crops is ‘‘slow’’ to them. The antenne of their 
radio are not tuned to catch the wave-lengths of the 
country, so that its messages do not reach them. Swift 
speech is theirs and instant reply, with no hesitation, no 
reflection. They cannot converse with the slow-spoken, © 
meditative farmer. 

Another cause of doubt concerning the future of the 
country church is discovered in the minds of farm- 
Owners who moved to cities and towns during the past 


fe bow, 


HAS IT A FUTURE? 31 


thirty years. They sold their farms or rented them 
to their hands. These men have sometimes curious 
convictions that there is nobody living in the country 
who would be interested in a church. Town-dwelling 
farmers look out upon the lands, once their homes, which 
now are scarcely less populous, with a social general- 
ization to the effect that life there is at an end. Is it 
economic conviction? Far from it! They collect rents 
from the dwellers on their old farms. They buy 
and sell those very lands under the toiling feet of the 
present tillers of the soil. But for them the structure 
of rural society is transferred to the town because so 
many of them and their kindred are dwelling in town. 

A curious feature of ‘‘Main Street’’ was the inabil- 
ity of its author to discern the agrarian basis of the 
society he described. For all he said of it, Gopher 
Prairie might have been a town of traders in oil or 
coal or lumber or fish. Yet the economic processes 
which explain the existence of ‘‘Main Street’’ are those 
of an agricultural people. The dignity and worth 
which Sinclair Lewis failed to discover were such as 
farmers know. If the book had been a description of 
the farmers, whom ‘‘ Main Street’’ exploits, it would have 
voiced something besides a bitter ery of futility. See- 
ing and hearing only the urban things, the writer well 
expresses the irreligious temper and opportunist spirit 
of the second generation of sons of the American 
farm. 

Then the country has suffered from the fact that 
daily newspapers are published only in cities. They 
are read everywhere. They give expression to what a 


32 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


day in the immediate surroundings of their cities may 
bring forth. Their writers are city persons. So far, 
therefore, as this influence goes, they create the illusion 
of the sufficiency and finality of the city. 

Another force that has to do with the creating of 
an opinion that the farmer’s way of life is at an end, 
is the extensive development of power. Within a cen- 
tury and a half steam power has changed the whole 
process of manufacture. It has made profitable large- 
scale production in factories and has rendered house- 
hold industries unprofitable. Within a _ half-century 
electric power has developed and extended the con- 
quest of industries begun by steam, until all phases 
of production are affected. Within the past twenty- 
five years gasolene power has extended the facilities 
for transportation. It has been applied to the work that 
the horse did in the past. So overwhelming has been 
its effect that the highways have been rebuilt at enor- 
mous expense for the purpose of swift, easy travel be- 
tween cities and towns. The driving-horse has in the 
past decade almost disappeared. 

A later form of motor transportation has put out of 
business the ox and threatens even the place held by 
the heavy farm horse. Tractors have come into the 
fields of the farm to do the work of the horse and the 
mule and the ox, leaving, as some think, very little 
place for draft animals. Granted that this swift ex- 
tension of power in transportation may have overrun 
its proper boundaries, it still is true that a great trans- 
formation has been wrought before the face of the farm- 
ing population, and the question is raised whether 


HAS IT A FUTURE? _ 33 


farming itself, a household industry, will follow cotton- 
spinning, weaving, lace-making, into a factory form, 
highly capitalized and centrally controlled. But thus 
far, by the application of power to agriculture the sep- 
arate farm family has been established upon the home- 
stead. The big bonanza farms have been cut up into 
small family farms in the very years in which the steel 
industry and the oil industry were being concentrated 
in the control of two great ‘‘trusts.’’ The telephone, 
automobile, and radio are friends of the family farm, 
not its enemies. Yet the spectacle of steam and elec- 
tricity has so fascinated the beholder that all Ameri- 
cans inertly await the devouring of the family farm 
by Capital and Power. 

In 1912 a college president in Ohio took me home 
to dine, to tell me that the day of the farm was done, 
that the way to organize agriculture was discovered by 
an Ohio match-manufacturer at Akron. This gentle- 
man had purchased a series of contiguous farms and 
employed their former owners and others as specialists. 
One was to care for cows, another for orchard trees, 
another for poultry. The whole was to be a revolu- 
tionary success. It was to be profitable. It was to 
introduce a new age. At the death of the owner ten 
years later, this experimental estate was so little suc- 
cessful that it had to be endowed. Alas for the farm 
that pays no profit! The neighbors of the theorist who 
have no millions to endow their experiments,—and 
every farm is a venture,—are indeed complaining of 
their poverty; but they are paying expenses, while his 
specialized estate shows a deficit. Other capitalists 


34 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


have not imitated the example set. Recently Mr. Henry 
Ford, who makes a success of all things round, like 
wheels or dollars, has freely predicted that the day 
of the lonely farm is at an end, for he has planned a 
better way! Mr. Ford has indeed served the farmer 
greatly, but in the way of providing him a swift and 
handy chariot, ‘‘that will go anywhere and back 
again,’’ and by devising a small tractor for the small 
farmer to plow with and sow with, and to fill his silo. 
But he is not aware of the preference which makes a man 
a farmer. Industrial magnates see only what can be 
done with measurable power. They fail to see the 
greater social and spiritual passions which make men 
till lonely acres. Yet so great is their popularity that 
the farmer assents to their utterances and thinks the 
way of smoky, noisy cities is the better way. For 
lack of prophetic voices in, the English language, in 
the United States, our people who love the land are in 
this generation half ashamed of their ideals. 

However, although in the sections suited to the use 
of machinery the rural population has decreased, no 
part of the United States has been depopulated. The 
prediction that was made sixteen years ago, when the 
Country Life Commission held hearings in Illinois, 
that ‘‘all the farmers would soon move to town,’’ has not 
been fulfilled. In fact, the farms in that section, 
though fewer in number, are as productive as ever. 
Their ownership is generally in the same hands or in 
those of their kindred, and their products are sold for 
thrice the return of 1908. In Eastern States there were 
‘abandoned farms’’ at the end of the century, but 


HAS IT A FUTURE? 35 


these discarded acres were incidental to a shift in pop- 
ulation and a readjustment of the land to a new eco- 
nomie process. Second-rate land was returning to 
pasture. Families were leaving the country because 
their outworn methods could not support them there. 
And the ‘‘abandoned farms’’ which were not annexed 
to neighboring ‘acres were eagerly bought, as soon as 
the tidings of their vacancy had gone forth, by city 
dwellers or immigrants with a competency to be in- 
vested in a home. | 

Meantime, the regions of poor soil, where machinery 
could not be profitably used, show a rural population 
steadily increasing. The southern Appalachian re- 
gion, studied by Mr. John C. Campbell in 1916, shows 
an increase, in the 230 mountain counties studied, of 
18.1 per cent. as against 11.5 per cent. in the non- 
mountain region. So the country people exhibit 
their vitality. In the sections suited to general use 
of farm machinery, intensified production brought in- 
creased gain in the past two decades. In the inferior 
lands, population increased. In the face, therefore, 
of the idealization of the city and of the machine, 
strong forces are at work to continue the rural pop- 
ulation. 

And now a new agrarian ideal is given voice in 
the country. The war years, 1914-18, followed a 
period of extensive national agitation. During the 
war American farmers increased their production in 
response to the stimuli of patriotism and a natural desire 
for profit. After the war farmers were not willing again 
to be supine while others marched over them, so they be- 


36 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


gan a twofold movement. Codperatives, which had been 
srowing before, appeared in increasing number, and 
political organizations appeared whose representatives in 
the legislatures, state and national, were glad to be 
ealled ‘‘farm blocs’’ and to dictate ‘‘relief for the 
farmer.’’ 

The cooperative movement is solid and permanent, the 
legislative struggle to relieve the farmer is probably no 
more than the expression of a new ideal and an his- 
toric aspiration ; yet of the two it is the better illustration 
of our present contention. For it shows how the people 
are aroused and convinced of the distress of the farm 
population and the prime importance of the agricultu- 
ral industry. If it were not for this general conviction, 
the revolutionary legislation in the interest of country 
people could not have been enacted. The Smith-Lever 
Act of 1914, the Federal Vocational Act of 1920 known 
as the Smith-Hughes Act, and the Sterling-Towner Bill, 
allowed to die in the Sixty-seventh Congress, reintro- 
duced as the Sterling-Reed Bill in the Sixty-eighth, are 
all products of national convictions. We believe that 
the farming industry has permanent form in the farm 
family, and that the future of rural institutions is as- 
sured. The work of the churches should be adjusted to 
that conviction. 

In the post-war period books have appeared which ev- 
idence the same conviction. Notable among these are 
novels of Willa Cather, whose ‘‘One of Ours’’ was a 
prize novel of 1923. The poems of Robert Frost are 
country lyrics whose many readers discern through them 
the spiritual motives of country people. Just so our 


HAS IT A FUTURE? 37 


grandsires who were farmers saw their own play of 
spirit in Lowell. Even the contempt of the realists Sin- 
elair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson for the small town 
is consistent with the farmer’s low estimate of towns- 
people. But the literature of western Europe is the most 
abundant in expression of the new agrarianism of the 
spirit. Hamsun’s ‘‘Growth of the Soil,’’ Nexd’s 
‘*Pelle’’ and ‘‘Ditte,’’ and the writings of the Irish 
school—Russell, Synge, Colum, Yeats—are all lke 
the sound of a new music in the humanears. From Can- 
ada came the sweet melody of Louis Hémon’s ‘‘ Maria 
Chapdelaine,’’ to be read in cities by men who have never 
learned to drive a horse or to chop down a tree. 

~The example of the peoples of western Europe, among 
whom our churches mostly had their origins, is all on 
the side of permanence of the farm population with the 
institutions peculiar to it. There the churches are 
usually in the villages, which are many; because farming 
centered in villages until after the Reformation. 

The farmers everywhere require churches, as they re- 
quire banks, of their own. Reluctantly we are obliged 
to admit in the United States that each class of the 
population needs its own institutions. It took us a long 
time to recognize the farmer’s need of banks suited to 
the industry of agriculture. We now have the Federal 
Farm Loan bank system, grudgingly allowed to the farm- 
ers, who themselves did not discern at first their need 
of it. It was not a political concession only, but a 
sociological necessity. In the same way we need country 
churches in a class by themselves because a great rural 
population requires its own peculiar institutions. 


38 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


It has become evident that the people in the country re- 
quire schools suited to their peculiar needs. We have 
begun to organize them with a zeal even greater than our 
knowledge, as experience of mankind offers few examples 
of education adjusted to the needs of the productive and 
depressed classes. The country church is going to be 
as slow in emerging as is the country school. It will be 
as grudgingly allowed as was the farmer’s bank. Buta 
church adjusted to the needs of farmers is bound to 
come, because mankind depends upon the farming class, 
as an organized section of the population with its own 
institutions. 

The future of a church peculiar to farmers appears 
probable, because of the churches invented out of hand 
by farmers in those sections in which the older denomina- 
tions have retreated to the town and the city. Through- 
out southern Ohio, where once were organized extensively 
the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches, and 
where now many of these congregations have closed their 
doors, a new type of church has appeared, usually eall- 
ing itself by some name indicating holiness or perfection. 
Its members desire to be pure, untouched, spotless from 
the world. They are come-outers. They secede from 
other denominations and comfort themselves with their 
likeness to none, their superiority over all. In this they 
express the fault of the rural mind, unchastened and un- 
rebuked by the experiences of mankind. 

These seceders from Christian fellowship are usually 
ecstatic and emotional while their enthusiasm lasts. Fre- 
quently they are noisy and excited in their expres- 
sions, and sometimes they deliberately excite them- 


HAS IT A FUTURE? 39 


selves, as dervishes do, in the hope of. attaining an ecstasy 
of joy. It need hardly be said that generally they are 
lacking in leadership, inexperienced in the Christian 
tradition, and, so far as reading history goes, quite il- 
literate. Their ‘‘churches’’ seldom last more than two 
or three years, and very often they disappear entirely. 
I have been able to find only a scanty register of these 
extensive movements of ‘‘holiness’’ throughout the 
United States. It can hardly be said that they have 
added a new denomination, although they denounce the 
old. Their very existence seems to me to testify to the 
necessity of a country church that expresses the religious 
life peculiar to farmers. 

In the face of these facts, it is very discouraging to 
report the arrest or decadence of country churches. 
Religious institutions connected directly or indirectly 
with the farmer are in the majority of instances on the 
decline. Protestant as well as Catholic, Methodists 
highly organized as well as Baptists independent, they 
are losing ground except in sections of increasing popula- 
tion or among those populations which reinforce religion 
with racial tenacity and the use of a foreign language. 
The figures? of the decay of the country church are 
given by the Institute of Survey and Religious Research 
as follows. Of all the churches studied, a little less than 
six out of ten were found to be growing. In the colonial 
region less than half were found to be growing. For the 
country as a whole, half the churches made an annual 

1“The Town and Country Church in the United States,” Morse 


and Brunner. Doran. New York, 1923. Pp. 41, 42, 96. And 
“Diagnosing the Rural Church,” Fry. Doran. 1924. Pp. 163-181. 


40 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


gain of less than 10 per cent. Less than 20 per cent. 
of the Protestant rural population of the country are 
active church members. 


The total number of town and country churches is 101,477. 
Of these, 5.6 per cent. are located in towns; 30.7 per cent. 
in villages; 63.7 per cent. in hamlets or in the open country. 
. .. Approximately one-seventh of all the town and country 
communities, including 9 per cent. of the town and coun- 
try population, are without Protestant churches. There are 
33,808 other communities, or 42 per cent. of the total number, 
that have churches but do not have within them any resident 
pastors. There are 16,258 other communities that have both 
churches and resident pastors, but which do not have in them 
any full-time resident pastors. Thus only 21 per cent. of 
all the communities, including 28 per cent. of all the town 
and country population, do have within their borders churches 
with full-time resident pastors. 

The total membership of all town and country churches 
is 8,969,603, or 16 per cent. of the total town and country 
population. Seventy-one and three-tenths per cent. of these 
are classified as active resident members, that is, more than 
one-fourth are either non-resident or non-active. Eleven and 
five-tenths per cent. of those making up this membership 
are attached to town churches; 38.8 per cent. to village 
churches and 49.7 per cent. to country churches. The town 
and village churches, of course, include many members drawn 
from the country areas. The church members actually re- 
siding in towns represent 24.3 per cent. of the total town pop- 
ulation; those residing in villages represent 22.8 per cent. of 
the total village population; those residing in the hamlets 
and the open country represent 13.1 per cent. of the total 
hamlet and open country population. This latter percentage 


HAS IT A FUTURE? 41 


is low primarily because most of the communities without 
churches are country communities. ... 

One cannot help but be impressed by the sensitiveness of 
the Church as an institution to all changes which vitally affect 
the society supporting it. Various tendencies affecting the 
conditions of country life during the past decade have se- 
riously conditioned the problem of the Church. The most ob- 
vious of these changes has been the shift in population. The 
towns and the larger villages are generally growing in popu- 
lation. In the newer sections the open-country population 
has been likewise growing, though not so rapidly, but in the 
older settled sections the population of hamlets and of the 
open country, even in areas whose general population has 
increased, has usually suffered loss during the last decade. 
The tendency is for church membership to follow population 
with remarkable similarity. In these twenty-five counties 
two-thirds of the churches which are gaining are in communi- 
ties in which the population is increasing, and at least one- 
quarter more of the churches are registering gain in the face 
of a stationary rather than a decreasing constituency. Very 
few churches are found which were able to gain consistently 
while the population which they served was decreasing. 

It is hard to maintain a church in a decreasing population 
or where the interest of the population is being diverted from 
its local institutions toward some neighboring larger center; 
and this is true even though the areas of a declining popula- 
tion are, generally speaking, those in which the country church 
is most firmly rooted, while the growing communities, so far 
as the open country is concerned, are generally in areas in 
which the establishment of the church is least secure. But de- 
cline in population engenders a psychology of defeat; and, in 
fact, this explains also the difficulty of the church which must 
compete with the increasing influence of a near-by institution 


42 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


more strategically located. The consequence is, as has been in- 
timated in other connections, that the farm is becoming our 
most difficult church problem in the town and country area. 


This discouraging showing might well undermine 
everything except our faith in the American nation and 
in the Christian Church. There is encouragement to be 
found in certain large movements in American life in 
recent years, some of which have been referred to al- 
ready. Two striking facts are to be added: 

(1) There is a new interpretation of the country which 
has awakened in many men and women an interest in 
country people and a desire to serve them. There are 
increasing numbers every year going into rural religious 
service. The numbers are not so great as to satisfy the 
need, but the important thing is that the volunteers 
understand the country and go with a clear-eyed recogni- 
tion of what they are to find. In Illinois I have met in 
the past two years young men who are taking up country 
work in that increasingly prosperous section and are 
valuing highly the response of farmers and the residents 
of little towns. They are finding their happiness in the 
reward of living among country people. Two years ago 
a young man took me ten miles south of Decatur, to his 
manse, and then ten miles farther, to the field in which he 
desired to live, because, he said, it was filled with chil- 
dren. And indeed I found it so: an open-country place 
thronged with beautiful, attractive, intelligent children, 
simply clad, many of them barefoot, but with the good 
manners and the high breeding of a superior stock. It 


HAS IT A FUTURE? 43 


was his plan to make his home among them, out of reach 


of the city of Decatur, and give his life to them. 

(2) The development of the community church is an- 
other hopeful factor. Churches which express the re- 
volt of their communities against denominational dif- 
ferences, which give voice to the determination to be one, 
are developing in great numbers throughout the country. 
Mr. Piper, their historian, says: 


The development of the Community Church as a self- 
conscious movement in American religious life, is a new 
phenomenon. ... 

Since 1915 strong trends towards the community organiza- 
tion of religion have been developing in the Central and |. 
Western States. These trends have been felt also in the 
Kast. And in the past two years it is said that the interest 
in the Community Church has been greater in the South in 
proportion to population, than in any other section of the 
country. The movement is therefore unrestricted as to geo- 
graphical area. 

The actual number of Community Churches now operating 
is not known, but exceeds 800. ... New churches are at 
present being organized at the rate of six per month.... 
The denominational type is, judged by statistics, the least pop- 
ular form of Community Church in every section of the coun- 
try. The growth of the Community Church movement will 
continue. The only question is as to its rapidity. The chief 
needs are publicity and leadership. 


A third reason for hope of improvement can be added. 
There are signs that the country-church problem awaits 
a national solution. The great number of open-country 


AA THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


churches that are dependent upon national boards of 
missions for their support indicates that their depend- 
ence has a cause with which we must deal. ‘‘ About one 
in five,’’ say Morse and Brunner, ‘‘receive home mission 
aid.’’? This cause, probably, is in the need the farmer 
has for a national stimulus. What it means we do not 
know, but|the nation needs the farmer and the farmer 
needs the church. The logic of this situation may in the 
future bring many persons to recognize that the country 
as a whole through the denominations or through fed- 
erations of churches should support the local congrega- 
tion. In Seotland every parson of the United Free 
Church receives about two hundred pounds as a sus- 
tentation grant.* This, if he is in a city church, pro- 
vides a comfortable item along with what the church 
ean give: if he is in a country church ever so poor, 
it provides him with a meager living. But every man 
has a living. To this sustentation fund the church 
gives as it can, every congregation according to its 
- means. We in the United States may come to the 
same method. 


2“The Town and Country Church in the United States,” p. 107. 
3See Report of the Central Committee, United Free Church. 
Edinburgh, 1924. 


CHAPTER FV 


WHAT IS RELIGION? 


HERE is need, in American thinking, of a def- 
inition of the church. We have none in which 
we can all agree. The European definitions 
that have come through the denominations nearest in 
their origins to the Catholic, as the Lutheran and Protes- 
tant Episcopal, have not received general attention. 
American religious history has necessitated no definition, 
and is just beginning to provide itself with an ideal of 
the church. An individualistic conception has hitherto 
prevailed. A drastic evangelism has supplied universal 
language of popular religion, to the exclusion of ideas of 
the church. To the evangelist the soul is all. The au- 
thority of the congregation over personal character has 
passed. The whole machinery of discipline has become 
rusty. The appeal to the individual, in a population 
which for a century and a quarter has been increasing, 
and for a century has been recruited from alien elements, 
has been thrust to the first place. And for the sake of 
strengthening that evangelism we have deliberately 
put out of our mind all ideas of church or commu- 
nity. Yet they have crept in. 
We have not been content with our masses of 


church members. Doubts of the thoroughness of our 
45 


46 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


methods have obsessed us for a quarter-century. In 
spite of the vociferations of the soul-winners it is plain 
that, granting them all they contend for, the converts 
they win must be schooled in Christian living. A great 
humanitarian passion impels the older members born in 
the churches to pity the poor, to remedy the evils of 
the social system, and to voice the mind of Christ 
for this generation. So there has come into existence 
a sense of the church. But what is a church? 

In societies of increasing complexity the religious 
body has a function to perform. Its duties are not 
manifold, they are simple. Other agencies have func- 
tions which do not belong to the church. The minister 
is nowadays exhorted to stick to his religious duties. 
But what are his duties? Education belongs to the 
schools, charity to the agencies of poor relief; business 
has its manifold corporations, which devise ethical 
standards by themselves, better helped by the church 
indirectly than they would be if the church were in 
business; science demands the right to discover and pro- 
claim truths as to phenomena, uncontrolled by the 
church, and even unadvised. A complex social life 
honors the church for its evident value, but demands 
that it perform its inescapable task and leave others 
to their special work. 

There must be some reason for the universal con- 
struction of churches by societies. For societies are 
- universally and uniformly religious. Individuals dif- 
fer as to their religious profession, but societies all ex- 
press the social value of religion by erecting tem- 


WHAT IS RELIGION? _ Ar 


ples, tabernacles, synagogues, meeting-houses, churches. 
What, then, is a church? 

In the way of answer to this question we turn to those 
who find the occasion of religion in mystery. Amiel 
says: 


Society lives by faith, develops by science. Its basis, then, 
is the mysterious, the unknown, the intangible,—religion,— 
while the fermenting principle in it is the desire of knowledge. 
Its permanent substance is the uncomprehended or the divine; 
its changing form is the result of its intellectual labor. ... 
The efficiency of religion lies precisely in that which is not 
rational, philosophic, nor eternal; its efficacy lies in the un- 
foreseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary. Thus religion at- 
tracts more devotion in proportion as it demands more faith— 
that is to say, as it becomes more incredible to the profane 
mind. The philosopher aspires to explain away all mysteries, 
to dissolve them into light. It is mystery, on the other hand, 
which the religious instinct demands and pursues; it is mystery 
which constitutes the essence of worship, the power of pros- 
elytism. When the cross became the ‘foolishness’ of the 
cross, it took possession of the masses. And in our own day, 
those who wish to get rid of the supernatural, to enlighten 
religion, to economize faith, find themselves deserted, like poets 
who should declaim against poetry, or women who should 
decry love. Faith consists in the acceptance of the incom- 
prehensible, and even in the pursuit of the impossible, and is 
self-intoxicated with its own sacrifices, its own repeated ex- 
travagances. 


Religion, then, is a form of behavior in the pres- 
ence of the unknown. The greatness of religion in 


48 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


human life is measurable by the predominance of 
mystery over knowledge. The greater part of the 
universe is unmapped, uncharted, unexplained. To- 
ward this greater reality our attitude must be 
religious. Awe and fear, humility and forgiveness, 
are the expressions of man in the Jewish-Christian 
religions covering reality. Other religions have sac- 
rifices, ceremonies, taboos: and we inherit from them 
some of their forms because we have not fully emerged 
from paganism. But the followers of the Hebrew 
prophets and of the apostles of Jesus have for more than 
two thousand years translated religion into moral con- 
duct appropriate to the fear of one God who does 
righteously. 

The issue is confused somewhat nowadays, not only 
by the survival of paganism,—since all societies are re- 
tentive of their past,—but, even more by the habit of 
the scientific student to form hypotheses upon every 
conceivable subject. What they do not fully know they 
cover by a working hypothesis. So that there is not 
left any large area upon which awe may express its 
humility and reserve. Even the mysterious heavens 
above are explained by logical guesses of the astronomers. 
Thus the countryman who reads may not look up at the 
starry sky and think God dwells there. He is reminded 
to single out a planet and to note the location of the 
nebule. His universe, which is as great and awful as 
ever, has become to him something easy to classify. 
The astronomer is more likely to fear God when he 
looks up than the intelligent farmer is, for the student 
of the skies knows how little they are explainable and 


WHAT IS RELIGION? 49 


how evanescent are the guesses of scholars. Thus pop- 
ular science darkens religious faith. 

Another force that confuses our interpretation of 
religion is the presence in every population of mystics. 
These have an inborn habit of feeling themselves aware 
of the Divine. They have a sense for God. He is 
‘nearer to them than hands or feet.’’ To them re- 
ligious verities are phenomena. They ‘‘know God’’; 
though they would perhaps admit that it is by another 
sense than the five we have in common with all men. 
Yet they testify to experiences of the Divine such as 
other men do not have, that are as real in time and place 
as other experiences are. These men and women are 
not a majority of any society, but they are much in ev- 
idence. They often predominate in any religious as- 
sembly. They have had great influence in setting the 
standards of feeling, of expression, and of interpretation. 
Others who have not their ‘‘experiences’’ are silent or 
assenting, even though some of the greatest religious 
leaders and writers give no testimony concerning mystic 
experiences. So that it is common for men to speak 
about knowing God, when they mean believing in God. 
The sense-experience of the mystic, whatever it is, has 
set the standard of expression. The fact that God is un- 
Seen and unrevealed in phenomena, that ‘‘no man can 
see God and live,’’ is forgotten and religious experiences 
of which only a few are capable are presented to the 
many as the standard experiences. 

I am not interested in the truth of the mystic’s ex- 
perimental evidence. To him it is authoritative. I will 
go so far as to say that it should for him have authority. 


i | a THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


My only contention is that it is not an experience re- 
quired of every Christian by the standards of his faith 
or the example of his greatest prophets. It is open to 
very few. Yet the vividness of it and its desirability, its 
fruitfulness in joy and emotion, have caused it to be 
taken for the universal religious experience. It has 
made religion a phenomenal thing. Whereas the great- 
ness of religion is in its relation to the unknown. The 
act of the religious man is faith, not knowledge. 

In Bernard Shaw’s play ‘‘Saint Joan’’ the Maid comes 
before her first opposer, who demands to know the means 
by which she apprehends her visions. She replies that 
it is by means of her imagination. Shaw, that inter- 
preter of human experience, in his idealization of the 
heroic Joan elevates her above common understanding 
of her, by placing her inspiration in the moral realm 
rather than the emotional. He makes her a heroine in- 
stead of an ecstatic. 

Country people, who generally have no church theory, 
but only a doctrine of the individual, are prolific in their 
religious experiences of a mystic sort. American reli- 
gious history, especially rural history, unchastened by 
the ethical restraints that would inhere in a social doc- 
trine of the church, is filled with ecstatic annals. Re- 
vivals run wild. Soil-born sects flourish. Lonely living 
vegetates in individual passion for God and in cravings 
to save souls by ‘‘praying them through”’ a like passion, 
or the imitation of it, into peace. Every country com- 
munity has its quota of fanatics who know God and so 
can rebuke their moral betters—regardless of blameless 


WHAT IS RELIGION? 51 


lives and fruits meet for repentance—because they are 
themselves ‘‘ perfect.’’ 

One does not need to regret this, or to find a flaw in the 
character of the mystic—who has his peculiar virtues— 
if he desires, as the writer does, to build his understand- 
ing of the country church upon its true basis of faith in 
unseen realities. The mystic has rendered great services 
to the cause of religion; probably he has a peculiar use 
that no other can render. But there must also be a 
place in religious life for the man who has no phenomenal 
evidence of Divine things. There must be, therefore, © 
a common basis for him and the mystic as well. It is 
found in the recognition that God and the greater re- 
alities are unknown; that we are saved by faith. 

Likewise, the scientific worker is .not depreciated 
when one states that the verities of religion are beyond 
both his searching or his reasoning. I am not arguing 
against the use of hypothesis when I assert that to 
cover heaven and earth with ordered speculations has 
taken awe and humility out of life for the common liter- 
ate man. The scientist may say that his studies have 
brought him, by reasoning, nearer to God. They do 
not bring the man nearer who reads the popular 
Science of the daily paper and the weekly magazine. 
They rob him of his vision and veil the heavens in 
verifications, cloud the skies of wonder with measure- 
ments which weak intelligences cannot comprehend. 
Popularized sciences, disseminated through a myriad 
newspapers and magazines written by men skilled in 
neither research nor the interpretation of the cautious 


52 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


generalizations of the scientific societies, are read by 
the many. They substitute for the wonder proper to 
the unthinking a cock-sure information. So that we 
have a smart people, working daily with machinery, 
knowing a little themselves, talking glibly about science, 
with which they associate their daily contacts but of 
which they have no share, and waiting for a similar 
phenomenal knowledge of God. | 

Knowledge, however, has had nothing to do with the 
great and extensive religious experience of our people. 
The learned, trained to verify, have not been our 
prophets, but men of imagination who have spoken to 
lonely souls tried with the awfulness of life, and have 
called them to faith in the unseen God. Our religious 
leaders have been like Paul calling upon the people 
in Athens! to worship the Unknown God. The 
churches they have founded have the character of or- 
ganizations which stand in awe and fear before the 
unseen. Their resulting moral character is determined 
by the fact that the faith which has provided the 
United States with churches is Christian faith, whose 
God is a righteous God, austere and full of pity. 

The life of Americans on the land has been fruitful 
of religion because our peopling of this continent has 
been an awful experience. The early annalists of the 
westward march of the pioneers all dwell upon the 
fearsomeness of the wilderness: the forests dark and 
overwhelming; the vast plains where no law reigned but 
that of tooth and horn; the pitiless storms; the long, 
cruel winter. Wild beasts and savage men confronted 

1 Acts, XVII, 23. 


WHAT IS RELIGION? 53 


them on all sides. Is it any wonder that they welcomed 
the preachers and at their word fell down sobbing and 
repentant? 

And the life of country men of the present has always 
before it the wonder of growing plants, the mystery 
of animal life, and the inscrutable decree of nature, 
the seasons and the storms. The farmer lives among 
uncertainties about which he cannot be deceived; he 
knows he has to proceed by faith. He plants in the 
spring and waits for the wonder of germination and 
the miracle of growth. The Providence he deals with 
is unseen but stimulative to the imagination. The 
wonders about him engage his acts of duty. His in- 
dustry is a struggle with mysterious powers. Like 
Saint Joan, he hears voices, but they speak in his moral 
nature. The Christian tradition falling in such pre- 
pared soil, fertilized with poverty and labor and 
watered with ever so little preaching, has produced 
nearly all the religious vegetation we have in the United 
States and Canada. The cities admit that their 
churches could not live if it were not for the country. 
Pastors of city churches declare eloquently that their 
membership is recruited from among those who live not 
among the mechanical processes of mills and factories 
but among the mysteries of the uncertain tillage of the 
soil. Religion is native not to the world of measure- 
ment but to that experience of mankind in which he 
walks all his days on the edge of the abyss of mystery. 
Its roots are in awe; its fruits are the moral ventures 
of faith. 

The American churches have had a national origin. 


54 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


That is, the greater number of them have been planted 
by missionaries who were sent from older churches on 
the Eastern seaboard. Of one denomination, not the 
most zealous, in which there are enumerated ten 
thousand congregations, it is said that nine thousand 
were nourished in their beginnings by home-missions 
aid. The Western community had not long to wait 
for a preacher. On the heels of the trader and the 
railway agent came the missionary, supported by a 
‘‘orant in aid’’ from some denominational board of one 
of the older sects. His call first assembled the people 
for worship. They had to be exhorted at the start: 
but soon there was a Sunday-school, soon a congrega- 
tion to which with other ‘‘appointments’’ he minis- 
tered; until, if the settlement grew, it could support 
its own pastor and carry on alone. 

The churches which cover the land are, moreover, pre- 
dominantly of European types. .Most of the names of 
the congregations that dot the plains and face one 
another on village streets are European. The very 
sectarian divisions they perpetuate in America were 
first split asunder in western European states. What 
do Lutherans and Presbyterians and Methodists and 
Baptists and Catholics signify but that the American 
religion, even the most rural religion, is European? 
The original impulses which sent out these streams of 
influence to illumine the mystery of the American — 
struggle on the land were European imitations. 

And the American rural churches are moral centers. 
The sanctions for conduct have been, for a hundred 
years of pioneering, in the churches. The bitter 


WHAT IS RELIGION? _ 55 


struggle to purify family life which wrote the pages of 
church discipline in red, testifies to the fact that it was 
the church which decreed that marriage should be 
*‘pure.’’ It was the New England meeting-house that 
‘made the American monogamous. And when Mormon- 
ism in revolt decreed that its followers might. practise 
polygamy, the permission came in the form of a re- 
ligious decree, sanctioned by a bible, supported by a 
revelation. It was the churches of the United States 
that fought this feature of the Mormon creed and forced 
the Government to outlaw plural marriage. I am not 
here discussing the merits of the issue, but observing 
the ethical’: mind of the American church. 

Prohibition was organized by churchmen, propagan- 
dized throughout the churches, and carried to its 
national victory under the leadership of men who 
claimed the sanction of the Protestant churches. In- 
deed, in Ohio, the American method of temperance re- 
form was conceived as a praying campaign: women met 
in the churches to fortify themselves for visits to the 
saloon, on whose floors they knelt in prayer to testify 
to their reasons for interfering with an established 
business. 

Probably the average man thinks of the church as 
a place where conduct is discussed, and of the religion 
of the churches as a matter of conduct. We do not 
oppose his view in saying that religion is behavior in 
the face of mystery. The spiritual nature of American 
religion, its very lack of order and dignity, its reliance 
upon the spoken word, are all evidences that in this 
land men rely upon religious sanctions of conduct, 


56 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


that are not in material things or economic advantage 
but in the unseen world to which the preacher summons 
the attention. 

Among the many definitions of religion is that which 
describes it as a valuation of life. Religion in the mind 
of some teachers is the highest expression of worth. 
It is a value-judgment upon life itself. The expe- 
rience of religion is a conviction ,of the worth, the 
reward, the comfort, and the satisfaction of living. 
It is an affirmative answer to the question: Is life 
worth living? The Christian religion in particular is, 
by these prophets, declared to be the survivor in an 
age of the world for which other religions have proved 
inadequate, wherein suicide and despair would other- 
wise rule. 

In baser minds this sense of worth takes the form 
of comfort. Fears and unrest, discontent and violence 
would be the law of many persons incapable of analy- 
sis and of consecutive thought. To them Christianity 
brings, after prayer and profound contrition, a sense 
of reconcilement and of personal comfort. These are 
the souls to each of whom ‘tthe evangelist must say, 
‘‘Christ died for you.’’ 

The worth of life is given by Christianity to dis- 
ordered minds.t. Undoubtedly the revival meeting has 
the effect of curing many insanities of the minor sort. 


1 See “The Church and the Sick Soul,” by Anton T. Boisen in 
“The Adult Bible Class Magazine,” May, 1924. Also, by the 
same author, “Concerning the Relationship Between Religious 
Experience and Mental Disorders,’ National Committee for 
Mental Hygiene. 1923. 


WHAT IS RELIGION? | 57 


Obedience to Christ is the cure of minds diseased. 
Christ is the way for the feet of many who would 
wander in forbidden paths of thought, in delusions and 
loneliness. If it were not for the emotional functions 
and the control of will which Christianity provides as 
a suggestion, where would the hypnotists themselves 
draw their power? Too little attention has been paid 
and too little credit has been given to the evangelist as 
a practical alienist. The Roman Catholic priest in the 
confessional is the oldest psychiatrist now in service. 
Untaught in science, the parish priest inherits traditions 
of dealing with the mind diseased; and the evangelist 
in the inquiry room or whispering urgently into the ear 
of a shrinking sinner on the back seat of a country 
church, is an effective healer of the hurts of the mind. 
These ministers of Christ have done more, I venture to 
believe, than the keepers in the asylums, or the few 
trained physicians who guide men back to sanity from 
the border of madness. They find in our religion a 
conviction of the worth of life which saves the unsteady 
soul. 

Among country people there are many inferior minds, 
more in proportion than are able to remain at large in 
the cities. The strain of life is less intense, the ac- 
cidents and alarms are less acute in the country, and the 
exactions of farm labor are less than those of the city 
business. So that many inferior minds are recognizable 
in the country population, even to the unskilled observer. 
Social students? have attempted to measure the pro- 

2“Rural Sociology,” John M. Gillette; Macmillan. 1922. 


Pp. 115-119. “The Rural Community,’ Newell LeRoy Sims. 
Seribner’s. 1920. Part III, Division 3. 


58 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


portion of mental defectives in the composition of vari- 
ous rural populations. Their returns are too scanty to 
be quoted with authority. But in some sections of the 
country, from which the bright and aspiring persons 
have been drawn away by the attractions of city employ- 
ment, the number of morons and inferior humans is 
noticeably large. Very often the school-teacher or the 
minister becomes aware of the control of school or church 
by a man or woman whose conduct can be explained only 
in this manner. 

In view of this situation, which every social worker 
in the country will understand, the prevalence of revi- 
valism among country people has a justification. Until 
a better administration of life is possible and the weak 
can be sifted from the strong, until we can lift the 
administration of popular institutions that are governed 
by public opinion out of the hand of the weak brother 
and the silly sister, we shall do well to use a method that 
steadies and arouses them and forbids them to express 
the impulses of the imbecile and moron. We must be 
content with the negative result which the old methods 
have given. 

It is constantly asserted that Christianity is a re- 
ligion of individualism, that personality is its flower and 
individual character its foliage. This is true in a 
limited degree among American farmers. Probably the 
highest expression of individual independence we have > 
is the maintenance of the family farm. The weaken- 
ing of the incentive to be independent is observed, how- 
ever, in the exodus from the farm, the indifference to 


WHAT IS RELIGION? 59 


those conditions of life which would maintain the farm 
as a way of life when profit tempted to the town. Is 
it too much to say that the departure of many fam- 
ilies from the farm to the town or city expresses a 
dissent from the teachings of Christianity; which have 
called upon the soul to be strong and have summoned 
the personality to seek after God? The excessive in- 
terest in city life has many sources, but among them 
is some solvent of the austerity and the proud inde- 
pendence that has maintained the farm household hith- 
erto, in places where only Christian teaching can 
explain the self-sacrifice it requires. 

But a more startling evidence of the decay of Chris- 
tian influence is seen in the prevalence of dominating 
opinions and in the suppression of individual variation. 
The decay of the Christian religion is evidenced in 
the village and open country in the rule of the town 
over the person, in the power of gossip/and scandal, 
in the fear inspired by mass imitations, in the decay 
of habits of discussion, in the disuse by country people 
of intellectual analysis as a basis of any action. We 
used to have in the country superior persons. We now 
have discouraged all these as far as we may and driven 
them to live in cities where they have opportunity to 
be peculiar. It is dangerous for any one in a village 
to vary or dissent. But the very essence of Chris- 
tianity is the prophetic spirit, which makes men 
peculiar. When the Christian religion is at its highest, 
it finds a place for men who differ with their fellows 
and who express a critical mind. The low state of 


60 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


spirituality among country people is seen in the dead 
levels of opinion, the imitation of dogmatical statement, 
.and the authority possessed by conventional habits. 
To conform is required of every one, to testify and 
toa prophesy is not the custom among farmers, even 
in the pulpit. 


CHAPTER V 


HOSPITALITY 


HE beginnings of the churches in the United 
States were laid in the entertaining of stran- 
gers. Most of the country churches were 
established at the time of the first settlement of the 
land. The houses were opened to the visiting min- 
isters before churches were organized, and hospital- 
ity was one of the earliest functions of the church. 
In the country, people still entertain in their homes. 
The great majority of the churches are small and poor. 
There are no hotels in their vicinity and many of 
the visitors could not afford hotels if they were 
available. The custom of entertaining ministers, which 
is a usage as old as the Old Testament, is dearly prized 
by churches in the country. Sometimes the official vis- 
itor from denominational headquarters is quietly advised 
that he will give offense if he does not accept the hos- 
pitality of the people in the churches. Often in the 
wealthiest congregations of the towns the visitor is en- 
tertained with the same zest as the country people show. 
We must not forget this atmosphere of hospitality 
if we are to understand the country church. 
Not the sermon nor the service of worship is more 


prominent in the Sabbath spent in the country by the 
61 


62 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


‘preacher than the dinner to which he is invited. Re- 
membering that most rural congregations have no settled 
pastor,—not one in eight in Ohio is provided with a 
resident minister who is responsible for his own enter- 
tainment,—one has a measure of the boundless and in- 
cessant hospitality which keeps pace in the country with 
the preaching and the worship of the farmer’s church. 
Since the minister or visitor is taken to a near-by 
and substantial home on the farm or the village street, 
he often, though not always, meets thus the most sub- 
stantial citizens. Whoever has gone much among coun- 
try churches has his memory stored with vivid pictures of 
entering farm-yards, sitting in the farmer’s parlor, 
eating at the farmer’s table. 

When religion has outgrown churches, I suppose it 
will still express itself in dinners, for a meal is older 
than a temple. We are assured that the Lord instituted 
a sacramental meal, whether He established a church or 
not. Surely a dinner is nearer to the mind of God, 
especially a country dinner. And when art ceases to 
be academic, or childish, it will still set a table; for a 
common meal is a work of art. It represents life in as 
full measure as canvas or marble can. <A country dinner 
in a remote farm-house, with twenty-five at the table 
in the great kitchen, is one of the most representative 
experiences. Scientists should study the lesson of life 
at the dinner-party. For a country dinner-party is a _ 
social gathering. 

Nowadays they come to a country dinner in auto- © 
mobiles. What greetings at the driveway! What 


HOSPITALITY: 63 


explanations of the farmer’s intentions to widen the 
approach, that used to serve for carriages! What 
merry, expectant faces of children!—and kisses ex- 
changed by cousins who never dare on ordinary 
occasions! Then there is a long wait in the ‘‘sitting- 
room,’’ where the man of the house is not loth to 
explain about his pipeless furnace, or his new electric- 
light system. And all the time from the big kitchen 
issue sounds of bustle and odors of purest satisfaction, 
the smell of meat cooking, whiffs of spices in pies. 
And nobody looks that way; it would be unmannerly. 
The expectant group is enlarged from time to time by 
arrivals from the barn or the yard, or by whole family 
groups bundled in wraps. Finally the farm hands 
enter in their best clothes, which they have had on 
since breakfast. This is the sign that dinner is about 
ready. 

Nowadays we have place cards. It used to be easy 
to seat the family upon the genial call from the host 
to ‘‘sit down anywhere,’’ for once custom and privilege 
were clear and no one blundered. But now at each 
place is a pretty card with a verse, and beside it a toy 
from Woolworth’s store of trifles—each one unlike the 
other: a miniature elephant lifting tiny logs, a coach and 
four the size of a walnut. The children are no more 
pleased at these than are their elders. While the first 
turkey is carved and served by the patriarch, the verses 
are read and compared. There is more than one neat 
quip and some fine sentiment. But it is not till hunger 
is sated, an hour later, that the smaller children climb 


64 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


down from their chairs and encircle the table to inspect 
the tiny toys; and not every one of their elders is willing 
to part with the mementos of the occasion. 

The carving by the head of the house is a religious 
rite, which not even an eldest son may perform, and 
an artistic performance capping the good wife’s achieve- 
ment. We remember an old farmer who so completely 
analyzed two turkeys into portions for each plate, that 
the platter was carried off empty: every bone was 
served, with its due portions of dark or light; and 
on every plate a heap of potato, of turnip, and of 
dressing, so much that the plate could hold no more. 
On any but a holiday there would be expostulation. 
But to-day even the delicate maiden aunt who has never 
confessed a gusto for things, accepts her helping calmly 
and empties her plate in some manner. 

Now, the art of the country dinner is known to the 
women alone. To the men it is victuals. The women 
inspect every dish and taste every flavor, sense every 
shading of spice in pickle or jam, with delicate analy- 
sis of inherited recipes and nicety of comparison with 
other occasions and, other family customs. That this 
dinner is a work of art is shown by the regulated com- 
ment upon recipes. At the time of eating there is only 
silent appreciation, but the lady of the house trembles 
for the brown on her turkey or the ‘‘jell’’ of her cran- 
berries. Some other day, but not on the day of the 
dinner, these women will exchange the tricks of their 
art. To-day the talk is of all else than the masterpiece 
in which the day centers. 

The profound friendship in which the foundations 


- 


HOSPITALITY 65 


of the church are laid develops in the house even 
more than in the public meeting. It is in the enter- 
taining of the guest, a voluntary act, which cements 
the movements of feeling as the passive states of religion 
do not. Hospitality gives the learner in religion some- 
thing todo. Iremember the devoted attentions bestowed 
upon me as a guest and speaker in many a country 
place. They were ready to sacrifice themselves for my 
comfort and convenience. Once in Wisconsin a farmer 
eighty years of age who all that morning had plowed 
a field, rode with me in his automobile forty miles 
to a train, that I might make a convenient connection. 
I shall never forget the old man, his white hair like a 
poetic phrase, sitting with me in the rear seat while his 
son raced us across the prairie. There was finer elo- 
quence in his attentions than in anything I said that 
day. 

It is evident to the student of the small church, 
especially in one of the minor denominations, that the 
lesser communions live in an intimate personal acquaint- 
ance. Every minister knows or has met each prominent 
member of nearly every church. The meetings of the 
whole body have brought them together from the ends 
of the country. One cannot understand the many de- 
nominations we have in the United States until he 
realizes that religion dwells in hospitality. Against 
this cordial sense theories of church union beat in vain. 
If our religion were a matter of philosophy, we might 
have church union and we certainly would have creeds 
<‘made in America.’’ If it is to be efficient in a practi- 
cal sense, it must be catholic. Instead of being any 


66 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


of these it is hospitable. It exercises itself as much 
at a dinner table as at the sacramental board. There- 
fore we have in this country a multitude of small 
denominations, each of them just big enough for every 
prominent family to entertain each of their distinguished 
ministers, bishops, or secretaries. 

The church is the most distinguished experience of 
most of its members. The officer of a small church be- 
longs to something more notable and famous than any 
other connection to which he adheres. To see the of- 
ficers of a little congregation serve in their places in 
the aisle or at public meetings by the minister’s side is to 
realize that these men have in their church a dignity 
which for them is unique. 

The house of the minister, when he resides in the 
country, becomes a center of hospitality. It is nec- 
essary for him to entertain a great variety of guests. 
His is the official home of the congregation. Every one 
comes to him first. He must have a readiness to receive 
the stranger—not the tramp or the beggar, who are quite 
as welcome or unwelcome in the homes about, but the 
official visitor, the district superintendent, the arch- 
deacon, or the evangelist. In the old times, resident 
ministers could have many servants. They possessed, 
moreover, a small farm for the raising of produce and 
the supplying of house and barn with an abundance of 
food. Labor was cheap, money was scarce. The min- 
ister with little was abundantly supplied; he occupied 
a superior position. 

The tradition of the hospitality of that day persists. 
It is often a burden upon the minister’s wife at the pres- 


HOSPITALITY 67 


ent time. She should be spared; for, with all forbear- 
ance on the part of the thoughtful, her burdens will still 
be great as the official hostess of the little society. 
There are great advantages to match this evident cost. 
Upon the minister’s children the effect of entertaining 
is valuable. They will never forget the experience of 
the dinner table where strangers are so often present. 
Unconsciously they acquire the manners of the larger 
world. They enjoy an extraordinary advantage who grow 
up in a minister’s house in a small community, for the 
guests are their teachers and the class is one of free dis- 
cussion, natural expression, and critical discrimination. 
The children see behind the scenes. They learn words 
of sincerity as well as hear the expressions of eloquence. 

The exchanges in the house are more vital than the 
messages of the church. The children of the family, who 
say little but look on and listen, absorb more of the re- 
ligion of the official visitor than they would get from his 
public utterances. In New York State a farmer’s son 
said to his father: ‘‘That preacher of ours has never 
asked to see the dairy. All he cares for is to eat and 
sit in the parlor.’’ 

Just so the. hospitality of the little church is an oc- 
casion for the intimate meeting of the humble church 
member with the most noted orator. A young official 
of the Methodist church related his experience in a vil- 
lage home. As he was summoned to the table, his hostess 
paused and impressively said to him: ‘‘That chair you 
are sitting in—the bishop sat in that chair five years 
ago.’’ 

Conversely, the little church in the open country or 


68 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


small town has been from the first a school of good man- 
ners. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say 
that American etiquette has been strained through the 
mesh of the country church. The earliest, simplest, and 
most numerous schools of conduct as to both ethics and 
etiquette are the churches in the small communities. 
The hospitality of the small church is for many people 
a discipline in good manners and in fine restraint. Men 
are converted to active Christian faith in connection with 
their aspirations to do well in the world. They join 
the church in adolescence or early married life when 
ambitions to get on are strongest, so that the experiences 
of the meeting-house go deep into their memory and 
shape their conduct. The men see how other men be- 
have, the women note what other women wear. Imita- 
tions pass without friction or reluctance in the atmos- 
phere of religion. Saint, Paul spoke wisely when he 
bade his converts imitate himself. Jesus appealed to re- 
ligious feeling in commanding His disciples to imitate 
Him. In lesser ways every religious meeting is an -ex- 
perience of leadership and following. Conduct, there- 
fore, is made in churches, and behavior is modified there. 
Thus, religious custom is at its highest in the United 
States because in a new country the churches have had 
to extend themselves by visiting and entertaining and by 
hospitable acts one to another. The American churches 
have a lively sense of fellowship, because we are a new 
country. In this hospitable atmosphere the impartation 
of manners and impulses in conduct has had greater 
force, so that the American church is the national school 
of manners. Since most of the old American stock come 


HOSPITALITY 69 


from small communities, from farms and villages, it 
follows that the church in the town and country has 
been the drill-master of Americans in the way they 
should behave. It teaches ethics and it is arbiter of 
etiquette. 

Very naturally the American churches came in due 
time, by the way of culture in manners, to the reform 
movement which resulted in the prohibition laws. Here 
is a habit of eating and drinking controlled by law, 
largely because Protestant churches, which in the United 
States are products of the soil, have declared the use of 
alcohol as a beverage to be asin. Their influence initi- 
ated the movement to outlaw the drinking of wine. At 
the present time the Protestant churches in this country 
would overwhelmingly oppose the slightest modification 
of the national prohibition law. Strange situation in 
which a habit of hospitality is determined by an act of 
the legislature! But stranger still is the social experi- 
ence which required it. 

But if one understands the states of mind of small 
communities, he will be amazed to see how they dictate 
behavior and impose their control upon the young, upon 
those who teach the children in the schools, upon min- 
isters, and upon some public officials. By this demo- 
cratic control of conduct the mind of the church is 
molded in the homes. This dominance of the home in 
religion may explain to the foreigner the origin of the 
prohibition laws, which have roots in the hospitality of 
the farm and the village home. 

In the organization of these churches themselves, hos- 
pitality is exalted to a place equal to that of doctrine. 


10 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


Church dinners are quite as necessary to the small con- 
gregation as sermons are; and, except during one hour of 
the week, a sermon would suffer if it attempted to com- 
pete with a dinner. No custom of the small-town church 
is more essential than the breaking of bread together. 
As the church develops and expands, equipment for 
cooking and eating is added to that for speaking and 
hearing. Before a country church builds class rooms, it 
builds a kitchen; and when one faces the facts of life, a 
place to cook and to eat is more essential to the proc- 
esses of religion than a place in which to teach the 
words of a book. The Sacrament is earlier than the New 
Testament, and the Passover is older than the Old. 


CHAPTER VI 
WOMEN 


HE prosperity of the church depends upon the 
stability of the population. The stability of 
the population in the country has its measure 

in the contentment of the farmers’ wives. The country 
woman of the generation just past has been discontented. 
A change toward greater contentment—or perhaps to- 
ward greater courage—is recorded in the past five years. 
The investigations of Miss Florence Ward of the Depart- 
ment of Agriculture at Washington have registered this 
change. The reasons for the discontent of farmers’ 
Wives and daughters are profound and far-reaching. 
The feminist agitation of the past generation has not 
overlooked them. There was in the atmosphere a seed of 
discontent borne along on the winds of public opinion. 
It could not be shut out of any house. But beyond this 
the farmer’s wife has in her occupation many sources of 
unrest. All she needs, to cause her to leave the old 
home, is an open way of release. The result has been 
that women are the leaders of the movement to town and 
city. And young women are found on the farms in lesser 
numbers than young men. 

The toil of the self-subsisting household of 1840 is 
gone; but in its place is the grinding routine of feeding 


‘‘hands’’ at harvest-time, and on milk farms at all 
71 


72 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


seasons. The writings of Hamlin Garland were a bitter 
attack upon the toilsome and dreary life of the middle- 
West farm home. His descriptions of the threshing 
scene were arid and strained, his pictures of the filthy 
farm-yard and the repulsive drudgery of the barn were 
depressing, but his testimony to the joyless life of the 
farmer’s wife was the most damning of all. In his 
later writings Garland has found poetry to describe and 
beauty to record in the Western farm. But his earlier 
writing, in which he expressed his own revolt and 
rebellion against farm drudgery, showed why the farm 
woman in the West has fled to the town. 

The life of the American farm enticed women and 
rewarded them so long as it was adventurous. While 
the pioneers were going westward their women wished 
to go with them, because they shared the desire for a 
new country. Women are never afraid of hardship 
when their men are engaged in it. But as the illusion 
of the ‘‘home in the West’’ passed, the women, true 
realists always, saw the fruitlessness of the life struggle. 
first. Hamlin Garland’s mother wearied before Richard - 
Garland, her husband, did of their many moves from 
farm to farm upon the prairies." The ‘‘Star in the: 
West’’ dimmed for her before her husband had lost his 
illusion. So the women in the great farming sections 
began before their men did to long for the town and to 
complain of the drudgery of the farm, its hopeless, un- 
rewarded fight with dirt and poverty. The men could 


1“The Son of the Middle Border,” Hamlin Garland. Macmil- 


lan. : 
} 


WOMEN 73 


see a generation ahead and the men were right. The 
present generation possesses what that of 1890 desired. 
But the women of that decade desired for their own par- 
ticular children an education fit for Americans. They 
wanted for their families a taste of the new culture 
crudely voiced in the village Chautauqua. They craved, 
with the hunger of all the women before them for the 
three generations since their ancestors had departed 
from Europe, better clothes and the opportunity to wear 
them, books to read and music to hear. 


A windy November evening in the little old farmhouse. 

“Ethan Ripley, you’ll haff to do your own cooking from 
now on to New Year’s. I’m goin’ back to Yaark State.” 
[Quizzical surprise on the part of old Ethan!] 

“Howgy ’xpect to get the money, mother? Anybody died 
an’ left yeh a pile?” 

“Never you mind Vere I get the money, so’s’t you don’t 
haff to bear it. 

“You need “Ate frit me of bein’ poor, old woman,” said Rip- 
ley, flaming up. “I’ve done my part t’ get along... .” 

“Oh! I ain’t done no work, have I?” snapped she... . 

“T don’t know what y’ call doin’ my part, Ethan Ripley; 
but if cookin’ for a drove of harvest hands and thrashin’ 
hands, takin’ care o’ the eggs and butter, ’n’ diggin’ taters 
an’ milkin’ ain’t my part, I don’t never expect to do my part, 
’n’ you might as well know it furst’s last. 

“T’m sixty years old, an’ I’ve never had a day to myself, 
not even Fourth o’ July. If I’ve went a visitin’ ’r to a 
picnic, I’ve had to come home an’ milk ’n’ get supper for you 
menfolks. I ain’t been away t’ stay over night for thirteen 
years in this house, ’n’ it was just so in Davis County for ten 


74 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


more. For twenty-three years, Ethan Ripley, I’ve stuck 
right to the stove an’ churn without a day or a night off.” 
Her voice choked. ... “And now I’m a-goin’ back to Yaark 
State.” 

Ethan was vanquished.? 


It is surprising to learn that the country girl is more | 
discontented than the boy with the life of the farm and 
the village. In a recent study of a score of farm homes 
on a highway in New Jersey we found not one girl over 
sixteen remaining at home. Some of the young men 
had remained on the farms. The study of a beautiful 
farming village in the center of New York’s most 
fertile farming region brought from the girls the decla- 
ration that they would lke to go away from that place 
to live. One girl wrote, in answer to the inquiry as to 
her reasons, ‘‘I want to leave the farm because I live 
on one!’’ In this place a goodly proportion of the 
boys elected to stay; some gave reasons for their 
preference such as the nation’s need of food and the 
farmer’s duty to provide it. There is no measurement 
known to me of the relative proportions of boys and girls 
who stay, but there are many evidences that the exodus 
from the country is led by the young women. 

This may be part of the restlessness which possesses 
sO many women at present, a symptom of change in the 
very form of society itself. The girl may want to leave 
the farm because her mother prompts her to do so. 
The desire for something different, especially a sort of 
life in which the status given to the man may be given 


2“Main Travelled Roads,” Hamlin Garland. 





WOMEN 3 5 


to her,—as is not the case on the farm,—may have some- 
thing to do with it. If so, then the rural exodus is 
partly explained by social restlessness, particularly the 
— discontent of women. 

It is evident in all the cases that have come to my 
attention that the girl fails to see reasons for staying 
on the farm such as the boys see. The motive ‘‘to feed 
the world’’ does not appeal to her. And because it 
does not, there is not the place on the farm for her that 
her brother finds there. The farm may feed the world, 
but she sees other women feeding only tired men and 
the task does not attract her. Something within her, 
strong, demanding, a sense of worth and joy, calls her 
elsewhere; while the like sense of worth and dignity 
appeals to her brother when he looks upon the fields 
and feeds the stock. He wants to produce. She wants 
-—something. She knows it is somewhere else. So the 
girl has come to be the wanderer who starts out from the 
village. In olden times it was only the boy who wan- 
dered. 

Of course some girls and women fear the country and 
cannot abide its loneliness. This is a physical fear and 
sometimes cannot be overcome. It is like the general 
aversion to snakes. It is more like the less general but 
_very real aversion to water which some have—a feeling 
hard, sometimes impossible, to overcome. Some women 
are afraid of the passer-by; they suspect every pedes- 
trian of being a tramp and a miscreant. They dread 
the dark. The call of the whippoorwill makes them 
‘‘feel creepy.’’ They never learn to drive a horse or 
an automobile. Such women used to stay in the house, 


76 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


and their lot was often dull enough; for some of them 
life was a crucifixion. They belong in towns and cities. 
It is well for them to leave the country. 

Girls and women without imagination, too, find it 
hard to live in a quiet place. They find ‘‘no life here’’ 
in the country. ‘‘This place is too dull’’ for them. It 
may have the beauty of the Alps or the charm of New 
England, but they cannot see it. They lack the eye to 
see, and no poet or painter has shown to them what the 
mind alone can see. They need to travel; then maybe 
they will come back satisfied. They need to read. 
Some day the moving picture may interpret to the dull- 
est of them the home beauties. Alas! most of the in- 
terpreters of life’s beauty are milling around in tawdry 
cities and towns, where they are reduced to seeing 
beauty in their own conceit! Egotism possesses the 
artists and the poets, not interpretation. 

And the country girl’s teachers—yes, her teachers— 
present an interpretation of the farm and village which 
leaves her cold. They have just one idea; the schools, 
the farm journals, the county agents, even the ministers, 
have no other. Country life is interpreted in America 
universally as mere production, which is a man’s job. 


It is not all of the farmer’s job, as a matter of fact; but — 
it is such an interest as to engage him and not his sister 


or his daughter. Instinctively the young woman wants 
something beyond production. She wants to have her 
own money, and there is no such thing for the woman, 


at least the unmarried woman, on the farm. Why does 


she want her own money? Because she wants to be a 
consumer rather than a producer. That is what God 


4Q 


' 


WOMEN | ""t 


made her to be, the creator not of goods or values but of 
joys and satisfactions, of comforts and interests. It 
is her place to give worth to life, not goods. It is the 
boy’s instinct to provide goods and to possess property, 
tools, materials. 

Only one side of country life is presented nowadays 
by its advocates. The Government has for two genera- 
tions now had an agrarian policy, but it is not a 
woman’s policy. It has to do with land and what land 
will produce. Cities have been growing, which want of 
the farm what they need for food and clothing. Their 
demands are ruthless. They publish the papers, send 
forth the teachers, motivate the legislators, put their 
illusion upon the orators and preachers. No voice is 
heard but theirs. The city cares not for the farm home, 
nor for the beauty of the village street—has not done 
so heretofore, at any rate. It cares for nothing but 
goods for its own wants and needs. It is a hungry 
beast. It is the teacher of all our people. It says to 
the girl: ‘‘If you want to buy and to enjoy, come to 
me; I have goods, comforts, beauties for sale.’’ 

The result of this restlessness on the part of young 
women, their desire to wander from the home town, is 
a great impoverishment of the life of the country. It 
is true that it is an effect itself of a poverty of ideals; 
but it is a cause of a social poverty which every one 


feels who lives in the country. Young men are of 
course discouraged who might prefer country life. 


They are called away to the cities and towns by the 
affections that would build homes in the country if the 
daughters of the farm loved it even as well as the sons 


78 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


do. The boys follow to the city, both because their 
proper mates are there and because they share the in- 
stinets of the women—which, although I have attributed 
them to the girls, are to a lesser degree possessed by the 
boys also. The boys, too, want to consume other men’s 
goods. The teachers of the time declare that the farm 
and the village are fit only to produce. 

Life in the country is harder, too, for the aged. For 
the values and the joy of life are given it by women. 
They are the artists, the beautifiers, the makers of com- 
forts. When one is old he ceases to care for goods and 
wants the values of goods. He loses interest in a fat 
beef-creature and wants to eat at a perfectly appointed 
table. He has not the joy he had in a flock of sheep; 
he wants to wear a well-fitting suit of clothes and be 
told that he looks well in it. It takes a woman to tell 
him that, above all a daughter. Alas for the old farmer 
whose daughter is toiling in a factory town that she 


may have a room of her own, furnished as she wants it! © 


There are medicines for the restlessness of young 
women, I suppose; though one who has had experience 


of it knows too much to make large claims. I would — 
send the daughters of the farm traveling. Let them see 


many places, especially cities, factory towns, business 
houses. They may come home better pleased with their 
own place. In any case they must not be penned up, 


forbidden, repressed. The excursion will serve as voca- — 


=” 


tional guidance, to help them decide where they are to 


live with the fewest regrets in after years. Books will 
do it. The moving pictures, if good taste is used by the 
parents and teachers in selection, will do much; that 


WOMEN 719 


is their social use. We want to keep only those girls 
on the farm and in the village who will gladly stay 
there, with real love and understanding. 

But the real remedy must come in a complete rever- 
sal of the policy of government departments and of the 
public schools, farm journals, and county agents. Why 
should they forever voice the city’s greedy demand, 
‘‘produce, produce, produce’’? The main purpose of 
the farm and of the lovely village is to live, to consume, 
and to enjoy. To see the values of life is more religious 
than to increase the goods. Men of good taste can be 
poor and happy. But the mere producers are most 
unhappy. ‘Toilers, the more they have the more they 
complain. The farmer has an advantage over other 
laborers in that he owns or expects to own his home, 
which is to him a thing of beauty as well as a mine of 
wealth. Until Americans cease to command the farmer 
to mine the soil, and until his teachers learn to teach 
him to get joy and value out of his own goods and com- 
fort out of the goods that others produce, we shall have 
discontented women, and girls will say, ‘‘I want to leave 
the farm, . . . because I live on one.”’ : 

There is a new spirit in the farmer’s wife in these 
days. Farming has taken on the aspect of a new ad- 
venture. Its possibilities in the way of consumption of 
goods to create pleasure and comfort are greater than 
they were thirty years ago. The women see even a 
better future for their daughters. In 1922 an inquiry 
sent to ten thousand farm women by the ‘‘Farmer’s 
Wife’’ brought back about eight thousand answers to 
the question, ‘‘Would you desire your daughter to 


80 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


marry a farmer?’’ and the great majority were in the 
affirmative. 


To-day another great contribution to the spiritual value 
of the private household ministrations is offered in the new 
uses of electric power. Already the “servantless house” is 
widely advertised. The grave difficulties in household ad- 
justment made by the growing unwillingness of competent 
girls and women to do anything in the household of strangers, 
and thereby giving rise to the serious “servant-girl problem” 
for people of limited means, are being mitigated by the new 
devices of this modern wizard electricity. It seems to many 
of us that had this magician been discovered before the in- 
vention of steam-power-driven machinery, the whole tendency 
of modern industry would have been turned not so absolutely, 
if at all, toward the factory. Such modifications of domestic 
manufacture and handicraft as right use of electricity could 
have initiated, might have prevented some of the social and 
economic evils of our present labor world. However that 
may be, it is clear that now the modern housewife has at — 
her hand the means of easy control of her special family du- 
ties such as no ancient woman could have conceived.’ 


In country churches women are not much more numer- ~ 
ous than men. This surprising statement may be 
verified at a church meeting in the open country. Sta- — 
tistics support it which show that church membership — 
and church attendance in the country are about equally 
divided between the sexes. ‘‘At the morning service 
39 per cent. are adult women; 31 per cent. adult men; 


8“The Family and Its Members,’ Anna Garlin Spencer. 
Lippincott. 





WOMEN 81 


25 per cent. are members under twenty-one years of age, 
and the remainder are children. In the evening, adult 
men and women in equal proportion make up three- 
fifths of the audiences.’’* The reason is probably not 
found in a more general reverence and piety among 
the men, but in the suppression and silence of the 
women. Farmers’ wives cannot move so freely as farm- 
ers can. Until use of the automobile became general, 
they had to depend upon the men for a vehicle, and 
even now, with convenient motor transportation, fewer 
women drive abroad than men. It is still true, there- 
fore, that the attendance upon a country church on the 
part of the women is proportionally less than in the 
town or city. 

The woman in a church represents management. 
The part of the church the women have made for them- 
Selves is the best managed. They contribute to the man- 
agement of the congregation very often, when it is small 
and weak, the improvements which good managers 
would devise. 

Women have their own type of management.® Com- 
promises do not embarrass them. Abstract theory does 
not engage their minds. They are said to have intui- 
tion in judgment, and they undoubtedly do take every 
Short cut to their objective. They are skilled in ex- 
pediency; opportunitism is natural to them. They 
deal not with a theory imposed upon things but with 


4“Tested Methods in Town and Country Churches,” E. de S. 
Brunner. Doran. 

5“Women and Civilization,’ Ramsay Traquair, “Atlantic 
Monthly,” Sept., 1923. 


82 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


care of persons and things so direct and particular that 
theory has no voice. Women, moreover, in their ad- 
ministrative work are democratic and simple with one 
another. They have developed a high degree of fellow- 
ship of women with women. 

Yet from the chief offices of the church women are 
generally excluded. Open-country churches show the 
lack, in their equipment and state of repair, of the 
very element which women could contribute. Village 
churches probably show their superiority to open- 
country churches in a better management; for which 
women are responsible. There are more women than 
men in villages, as Paul Douglass has observed in ‘‘The 
Little Town.”’ 


There are few jobs and a surplus of unmarried women. 
. . . The conditions of town economy do not compel universal 
matrimony, which is a fundamental condition of rural life. 
Consequently the little town harbors more than its share 
of “old maids.” For this reason no other type of com- 
munity can command so large a voluntary force for its ideal- 
istic purposes; church, women’s clubs and all pursuits of 
ideals find an army of women with some measure of leisure 
and desire to be useful, ready to be mobilized for service. 
.. . Here is the most plentiful and unhurried supply of work- 
ers—if not the most competent—for every good work. 


The village women have a freedom from toil and a 
mobility of action which women on the farms have not, 
so that they can and do give the churches in the vil- 
lages an attention the farmers’ churches never get. 
The lawns are therefore cut before and around the 


WOMEN 83 


church, the buildings are painted, the floors are freshly 
carpeted, the pulpit platform is so cared for that the 
eye of the worshiper may rest upon it with comfort. 

These things are not done for the open-country 
church: Its repairs are those which ‘‘a practical man”’ 
would see the need of. Shingles, paint, and some de- 
vices for light and heat, seats that are comfortable, 
and conventional chancel furnishings are in the man’s 
judgment sufficient. Most open-country churches have 
no sexton or janitor regularly employed to sweep and 
dust the floors and seats and care for the grounds, and 
to have the building heated in time for the services of 
worship. 

Women on the farms are under a patriarchal social 
control. Rule by elders has for ages been the manner 
of tillers of the soil. In agriculture there is no equality 
between the sexes. Recognizing the place which women 
- occupy in the church life of the country as a whole, the 
contribution they make in management, the capacity 
for care of materials which they have, their power of 
accomplishment, is it not fair to suppose that the coun- 
try church which suffers from the lack of these things 
is in need of what women could give? 

The rural churches have in the past exercised them- 
selves in disputation, in legal arrangements, all dear to 
a man’s heart. They have suffered from lack of what 
women most cherish: management, care of details, per- 
fection of equipment, comfort and beauty. 

This ignoring of the contribution women are pecul- 
larly fitted to make is not confined to the church. It 
is rooted in the farm economy itself. It is even idealized 


84 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


in much of the teaching presented to the farm women 
by the State universities. It is the tradition that the 
woman shall be a lesser man, producing as he does but 
responsible for the trifling products of the farm, such 
as eggs, butter, and small fruits, for which he ‘‘has 
not the time.’’ She has been expected to make the 
garden—if, indeed, any is made. In limited sections 
she milks the cows. It is said that in the southern 
Appalachians cows are afraid of the men. This is 
probably an ironic expression, cryptic, the meaning of 
which does not appear to a woman until humor comes 
with age! Generally the farmer is a patriarch in whom 
centers the ownership, who holds the purse and deter- 
mines the expenditures of the household group. If the 
woman has money to spend, she too often has to make 
it out of her secondary forms of production. Witness 
the fact that she has brought the total value of poultry 
products up to that of wheat. But always she is a 
lesser producer; never is she generally admitted to have 
a function of her own that might be equal as a rule and 
greater in the end than that of the man. 

The woman is the economist, and her sense of the 
values of life exalts the use of goods to as high a place 
as the production of them. She cannot forever be con- 
tent with the raising of the biggest hog or the produc- 
tion of the mammoth potato. She craves for her family 
better clothes and the pleasures of the mind. If she 
did not there would be no civilization, for God has made 
no other consumer; she is the artist of the household. 
So that she became the leader of the revolt against the 
tedium of American country life in the last decade of 


WOMEN 85 


the nineteenth century. She insisted upon moving to 
town at a time when the prices of farm lands were in- 
creasing, because she was willing to sacrifice profit in 
order to live in a community where a school’was to be 
had, a library and a store. The retired farmer’s wife 
made herself the responsible head of the house. She 
canceled her husband at fifty, in order that their own 
children might have a chance with the best in the next 
generation. She usually outlived him, because in town 
she had about as much to do as she had on the farm, 
while he had nothing for which he was fitted. She en- 
larged upon such cultural opportunities as she found 
there, and he had no equal interest in village ways or 
gatherings. She was sweetened and satisfied. He was 
embittered and narrowed. 

The regeneration of the farm industry awaits the at- 
tainment of a place of consumer by the woman equal 
to that of producer, which befits the man.® It is the 
finer part of woman to create comforts, the coarser part 
of man to produce raw materials. She is the cook, he 
the tiller and the cultivator. He tends the sheep, she 
cards and spins and weaves the wool into the stuff of 
which clothing is made by herself and her maids. To- 
day she is no less the consumer, who destroys goods to 
create contentment, when she prepares the meal and sets 
before her man and her children the food which is their 
chief daily satisfaction. She makes the beds. She sees 
that the house is attractive. Rest and comfort and re- 


6“The Economic Function of Woman,” Edward T. Devine. 
Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University. 
New York, 1910. 


86 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


ward are hers to create. She is the consumer. Her 
husband is the producer. But the ends of life and its 
goal are hers to attain. The means are his and he can 
never attain a goal. The church that is made up of 
mere producers is at the mercy of every economic 
change. The security of a country church is increased 
and its risks lessened by the attainment of a place, on 
the part of women, of power to consume goods to the 
end of comfort and satisfaction in the home. But this 
must first be the experience of the farm-house before 
it can take place in the church. 

The woman on the farm should be the partner of her 
husband, her office that of economist. Her share in 
management should be the keeping of accounts, the dis- 
cussion of expenditures, the discrimination between 
alternative uses of money. She should be the farmer’s 
daily adviser in all decisions, upon the purchase of a 
tool or of a plaything. She should be responsible for 
special wisdom in the decision to buy an automobile in- 
stead of a truck. Her judgment should be trained for 
the weighing of the family’s need of a piano instead of 
eighty additional acres of land. 

If women on farms in the United States were the 
economists of the farm and the home, the country 
churches would doubly profit. For, first, the farms 
would prosper and the church would share in their 
profit; and, secondly, the influence of women in the 
community would grow, and so the churches in the fields 
would enjoy better management. They would be better 
kept, more thriftily financed, and their properties would 
be a joy to the eye, their inner furnishings a comfort to 


WOMEN 87 


the weary soul. We are convinced, therefore, that there 
should be a revolution in the control of the country 
church. Women should be freed from restrictions 
which shut them out of office-holding in the churches. 

The freeing of women for office-holding in churches 
is not enough, but it should go forward because it will 
be a part of the liberation of women from restrictions in 
the farm economy itself. The whole movement is one. 
It is an extension to the rural society of that change 
which has enabled women in towns and cities to take a 
place, if the individual woman chooses it, on equality 
with men. Here it should take the form of partnership 
in the business of the farm, regarding the use of money 
for materials, this partnership to be consistent with dif- 
ferentiation of labor. It should consist also of equality 
in the church, so far as the officers of the congregation 
are concerned. This reform is important for the pe- 
culiar contribution that women can make. 

There is a new basis for the education of women in 
the learning of the universities at the present time. 
Within the past decade measurement has been made of 
the farmer’s income. Agricultural economics has upon 
this basis extended itself in the universities. In almost 
every State studies of labor income have been published, 
showing how much the farmer has to spend. The move- 
ment has swiftly become universal and recorded itself 
in the income-tax blank furnished by the Government 
for calculation of the income of the farmer. All these 
measurements are in a manner peculiar to the industry 
of agriculture. We waited a long time for them because 
no economist could at first devise a way for expressing 


88 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


the income of the farmer; until Professors Warren and 
Livermore studied intensively the business of farmers 
in Tompkins County, New York.’ 

‘Women should be taught the lessons of farm economics 
because theirs should be the expending of the income. 
Country churches might well hold classes for the study 
of the income. The pulpit of a country church should 
not hold itself above this matter, if the argument we are 
considering is sound. For the development of the 
farmer’s wife must proceed in the direction of partner- 
ship with her husband on the farm and equality with 
any man in the church. The objective in this reform is 
the enlistment of the abilities of women in the service 
of the church of the open country which has hitherto 
been managed by men only. 

The other discipline for the training of women is that 
generally called ‘‘Home Economies.’’ It has gone 
under a variety of names and it has taken many starts. 
The program of Home Economics at the present time 
is undecided but full of zeal. The women employed 
by the government departments and by the universities 
are following lines of expediency rather than of edu- 
cational principle. They seem to be doing whatever 
chores any one requires of them. They prepare their 
teaching program with the purpose of teaching young 
women to teach Home Economics rather than to marry 
farmers. Until the teaching of Home Economics is 
organized upon a clear understanding of the farm home, 
an outsider may not in this connection quote those who 


7“An Agricultural Survey,” Warren and Livermore. Bulletin 
No. 295, Cornell University, College of Agriculture. 1911. 


WOMEN 89 


teach the subject; but it is obvious that the proper pur- 
pose of this department is the training of women for 
life in small communities and particularly in farm 
homes. 

One who reads the bulletins discovers that year by 
year there is an increasing demand for instruction in 
the art of spending money. At first the women em- 
ployed in extension work were bidden by their directors 
to teach farmers’ wives how to produce more. The re- 
quests that come from country communities, however, 
call for instruction in the decoration of houses, the de- 
signing of clothing, the improvement of the farm-house 
grounds, and the training of children. All these are 
in the direction of getting satisfaction. It would appear 
that on a farm a man’s business is to create goods, the 
woman’s business is to create contentment. Each in 
a measure shares the other’s function. But between 
the man and the woman on the farm there is a distinc- 
tion: his part is the increase of wealth, hers is the 
destruction of wealth for the purpose of getting satis- 
faction. He is the producer, she is the consumer. 

Religion is obviously nearer the work of the woman, 
for religion is for most persons a quest of happiness, of 
comfort. Only the few quieter souls see religion as a 
creative act and express their faith in God as a Provider. 
To most men, and for all men on most occasions, re- 
ligion is a quest of joy and worth, so that what the 
women can do is the more popular and valuable re- 
ligious work. She ought therefore to be enlisted in the 
church for the services peculiar to her—the creation of 
serenity, harmony, and contentment. These will come 


90 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


through management, through artistic efforts the end 
of which is beauty, the creation of materials suitable to 
the common small daily needs. 

The farm offers to a woman the opportunity to in- 
fluence her children in a way she cannot in a town or 
city. The boys and girls of the farm are her children, 
while those of the city are the children of the school, 
of the gang, and of the street. Spiritually and in- 
tellectually she develops her children in her own life, 
which pervades the farm-house, occupies the Sundays, 
and gives character to the evenings. Whoever was 
born on the farm remembers the Sundays on which a 
devout mother gathered the small children together and 
set off with them perhaps for the grove surrounding 
the spring, there to tell them stories, read to them, or 
sing with them, as her character and their promptings 
determined. They were alone with her and dependent 
upon her; in the free hours of the day of rest she 
yielded to her inclination to cherish them and make 
them her own. 

It is true that the youth of the farm do not spend 
evenings and Sundays at home, in these days of motor- 
ing, so much as they used to; but the children under 
sixteen do not drive cars. There has been no change 
in their dependence upon the farm home. One must 
not suppose that because ‘‘autos have come as a new 
factor in farm life’’ they are in use every night. Farm- 
ers have always had vehicles. The youth of 1890 had a 
fast horse to drive, and the boy of to-day differs only 
in that he may go to town in less time, or to a town far- 
ther away. He is surrounded by the same conditions 


WOMEN 91 


that surrounded his father. The isolation of the farm 
gives the wife and mother extraordinary power to in- 
fluence character. The farm woman is the ideal mother. 
The infancy of her children is prolonged to the 
maximum. The extent and variety of her contacts are 
the greatest. While all the time she has spread out 
around her a school laboratory and a playground that 
awaken her children’s minds, stir their inquiry, and 
under her easy guidance form their characters. 

There are, according to Anna Garlin Spencer, ‘‘four 
duties the mother cannot delegate.’’ They are personal 
tendance that gives a child a motive to live; breast feed- 
ing with its consequent emotions; instruction in the de- 
cencies and early practice in posture and talk; the 
teaching of obedience and of initiative. A fifth is 
formal education, which she shares with teachers who 
are substitute mothers. Chief of these is motherhood’s 
devotion to child life—that selective and partial affec- 
tion which secures for each child one adult person at 
least to whom he or she is supreme in interest. 

I am aware that this chapter has presented only 
certain aspects of the life of women in the country. I 
do not ignore the number of women who manage farms, 
which in 1920 was 4.1 per cent. of all farm operators. 
But I am seeking the sources of religious experience 
which are discovered in the farm family, with its in- 
tense interaction of feeling and sympathy, its saturation 
by tradition. There is no evidence that the industry 
of agriculture can be carried on generally by women 

8 “The Family and Its Members,” Anna Garlin Spencer. Lip- 
pincott. 


92 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


or that the farmer’s church benefits by their attainment 
of a place as producers. If, however, that is to be a 
greater factor in the future than in the past, then my 
contentions are still further strengthened, that the 
farmer’s church should study those interests of most 
concern to women and advance women to a higher place 
in control. 


CHAPTER VII 


DOMESTIC ANIMALS AND PLANTS 


N intimate bond unites man and his domestic 
yaN animals—as close as the dependence of these 

beasts upon domesticated plant life. Animals 
and plants interpret nature to man. They find in him 
a protector of the high sort man finds in the Almighty. 
Man is their lord. One might fancifully say of the 
situation that the plants and animals have their religion 
in domestication; that the farm is their place of wor- 
ship, the barn their temple, and man their god. How- 
ever that may be, these lesser creatures are mighty 
factors in man’s religious and moral progress. With 
the improvement of maize early South Americans be- 
came cultured. The production of wheat and the other 
small grains characterized the early centuries of the 
growth of the ancient Roman state; and vineyards took 
the place of wheat-fields during the Empire. Social 
students declare that the spiritual experience incident 
to the keeping of cattle was the cause of the emergence 
of many peoples from savagery to barbarism. Polyg- 
amy was the domestic system of cattle-herders: monog- 
amy with its finer code of morality became possible 
only in connection with a closer tillage of the field crops. 


In our times the elevation of more than one people to 
93 


94 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


a position of social justice and intelligence has been 
accomplished by means of a better control of dairy cattle, 
hogs, poultry, and field crops. Denmark’s rejuvenation 
after 1864 was not accomplished without the rebuilding 
of her dairy herds, to the doubling of their butter-fat 
production. Perfecting the care of hogs and of poultry 
accompanied this social revolution. By the sale of these 
products the nation has become rich. But the Danes 
practised a better way of life by improving their de- 
pendent creatures. The attainment of their present 
position among the happiest, richest, most literate 
peoples in Europe is timed with the perfection of their 
pork products, their eggs, and their butter. The 
spirituality of the Danes at the very time they had con- 
quered the market-places of Europe is shown by the 
bold proposal now under consideration in their legis- 
lature for disarming their country. They are among 
the first of the nations to choose peace. They have 
learned much in sixty years of working with the Creator 
in the care of the kine and swine and poultry. 

Indeed, it may be questioned whether a people can so 
surely improve themselves in any other way as by the 
betterment of inferior creatures. If one may include 
children among inferior creatures, and compare domestic 
animals to children, it might well be maintained that the 
best hope of bettering social life is that of education for 
the child, selective breeding for the cow, the hog, and 
the hen, perfect tillage for the corn and the fruit-tree, 
and scientific feeding for all these dependents of man. 

A man ean study the betterment of his inferior 
creatures, and may carry out programs for their breed- 


DOMESTIC ANIMALS AND PLANTS 95 


ing that will conserve and intensify precious traits in 
successive generations. He may by feeding and train- 
ing increase their production in any one generation. 
Such improvements are impossible in himself and his 
fellows. But by improving his dependent children and 
animals, his inferior creatures, he may better himself, 
his family, and, if his neighbors codperate, his com- 
munity. If his nation as a whole undertakes the im- 
provement of children, animals, and domestic plants, 
the whole nation will improve. This is a spiritual proc- 
ess. More than the undoubted economic gains are the 
immeasurable moral experiences that a man has in the 
administration of living creatures that ery in his fields 
and breathe in his stables; while he ponders the mystery 
of life that is in them and in himself. 

A census of the live stock of the country shows ‘‘that 
the center of the swine population is at the Mississippi 
River, the center of the cattle population is at present 
in Western Kansas, and of the sheep in Western Ne- 
braska. In the case of dairy products, their center is 
in Western Illinois, but the center of the human 
population is in Western Indiana.’’ In each ease the 
center of live-stock population is hundreds of miles west 
of the center of human population. The census reveals 
a change that has come over the Eastern States, which 
as a rule are ‘‘almost wholly depopulated of dairy 
cattle, swine, and sheep.’’ Along the Atlantic seaboard 
there is, as a rule, ‘‘only one-tenth of beef cattle per 
capita, and a similar proportion is found in the case of 
Swine and sheep.’’ On the Pacific coast ‘‘the proportion 
is about two-tenths and three-tenths head per capita. 


96 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


The densest population of animals even in the middle 
West only equals the human population. Only one 
State east of the Mississippi River has a head of dairy 
cattle per capita. Throughout the rest of New Eng- 
land and in Pennsylvania, the proportion is less than 
two-tenths per capita. Fifty million people in the 
United States live in non-productive sections far from 
the meat and dairy supply.”’ 

Children love animals and, as a matter of course, ex- 
pect them to go to heaven when they die. Good teachers 
desire to use animals as aids in the training of children. 
They see that between the child and the animal are 
sympathy and understanding more varied and more 
forceful than have yet been established between the 
child and the adult. The mature animal is very often 
the child’s teacher, and always is his spiritual monitor 
in those ways of life that are common to all flesh. 
Parents of distinction in the affections of Americans, 
like President Theodore Roosevelt and Governor Alfred 
E. Smith, have taken with them, into the executive 
mansions provided for rulers, ‘‘menageries’’ of pets 
cherished by the children of their large families. The 
interest of the admirers of these public men in animals 
has been a testimony of the unexpressed confidence we 
have in the spiritual value of the beast as a helper and 
a tutor of personality. 

But what can all this mean for the farmer’s church? 
Is there any practical use the rural congregation can 
make of its animal population? I am not sure that I 
can fully answer the question. If the creatures about 
a farm are a solemn trust, it is worth while to state that 


DOMESTIC ANIMALS AND PLANTS 97 


truth, quite aside from its immediate use in a church 
program. It isa plea for the religion of country places. 
It interprets the spirit of the country. It may mark 
the sources of religious feeling and—if you will be 
utilitarian—may suggest subjects of study for those who 
would feel after God. The practical man, if he reads 
this chapter, may find a reason for promoting the breed- 
ing and care of cattle on Hastern farms. There may 
be in this a new challenge to Americans to renew the 
tillage of the acres about Eastern cities, if only for the 
spiritual gain that will surely come to our sorely de- 
pressed spirits. 

I am aware that I am making a plea for the small 
farm, on which alone the best economic results can be 
attained in the dominion of man over the beasts and the 
plants. The diversified farm depends for its profit upon 
the production of from three to five farm goods for the 
market. It employs the dairy cow as the foundation 
of its system. Her milk enriches the diet and assures 
a steady cash income, and her manure enriches the soil. 
With cows in the stall the continuance of the farmstead 
is assured, because its productiveness improves year by 
year. The small farms are the sure support of the 
farmer’s church. 

I saw in Santa Rosa, California, the tiny acreage on 
which Luther Burbank has wrought wonders in the 
domestication of wild species of plants, and the increase 
of the productive power of plants already domesticated. 
It seems to me a symbol of the little homesteads through- 
out the United States whereon lesser miracles have been 
wrought by humbler creators all over the land. 


98 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


Association with animals has in the past generated 
its appropriate religious feeling. In mountainous 
Palestine and in mountainous Scotland the Lord is a 
herdsman and man is a domestic animal. The Bible is 
filled with the religious expressions of shepherds. The 
prophet Amos was a cowherd, Moses had his vision while 
keeping sheep. In all these instances the occupational 
thought had as much to contribute as in the case of 
Jesus the carpenter, or Saul the tent-maker of Tarsus. 
It entered into the verbal expressions and the imagery 
of worship. 

But the domestication of plants and animals has in- 
fiuenced more than the vocabulary and the imagery of 
religion. These creatures have provided a scaffolding 
upon which faith may rise to the heights. For the 
fruit-tree is an ambassador to mankind from the 
creatures that dwell in the forest. The vine is a dele- 
gate from the shrubs. The corn plant is a living 
creature of grace and dignity that comes to tell the 
story of the food plants upon which the beasts live. It 
has now no home except the cultivated field. Every 
farmer with imagination senses the mystic symbolism 
of his orchard and his field when he looks beyond bow- 
ing fronds and winding stems, to the wild woods where 
their greater kin lives in serene indifference to himself. 
He knows the Creator through imitation of creative ways 
in the work of the garden. The orchard is always like 
Eden to him. The tree of life that he reads of in the 
first pages of the Bible and the last, commends itself 
to his sense as a symbol of truth; for he, too, has wrought 
with trees. He knows that they declare when ‘‘their 


DOMESTIC ANIMALS AND PLANTS — 99 


voice is not heard.’’ A minister in Ohio, who tilled 
four acres that lie between his manse and the church- 
yard, averred that he got his sermons on the two days 
of every week in which he farmed. 

There is an appeal in wild creatures. At dawn we 
saw two deer scamper across the meadow from one bit 
of forest to another; and when they leaped the fence, in 
soaring ease, we felt something within us leap that we 
had known only in a dream. _A whole neighborhood 
in Connecticut was interested when a wild goose settled 
upon the waters of their tiny lake and rested there for 
a day. All the men in hearing stop and look when a 
chopped tree crashes to the earth. The return of the 
robin is told in every house. The departure of the 
flocks of wheeling birds in the autumn is watched by 
every human eye. For these are symbols of life. We 
too live and would fly if we could. 

The creatures that have attached themselves to man 
came of their own motion, probably, as Kipling play- 
fully says in his ‘‘ Just So Stories.’? Witness the blue- 
bird and the phcebe-bird which build near farmers’ 
houses. The jeering crow seems to like a human near- 
ness, and has just about enough of it to suit his taste. 
Man and crow would miss each other if they were 
separated. The wren chooses human neighbors; she 
dramatizes some of our nervous ways to her own conceit 
and to our satisfaction. 

But how much greater is our understanding of 
nature’s mystery in the case of the beasts that breathe 
and bleat and bellow, and greet the morning with a 
shrill crowing! We should live in a reverie if it were 


100 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


not for them. From the time of the awakening of the 
savage mind, the beasts have seemed akin to man; for 
naked tribes have reasoned that the snakes or the bears 
are their male parents. Each individual among them 
has his totem. With higher intelligence mankind be- 
comes even more interested in the species of his lesser 
kindred, and makes laws to protect and conserve them. 
The savage revered his priest—his authority upon the 
genetic intricacies of totemism—and the cultured na- 
tions honor biologists because they give man an orderly 
relation to all things that live. 

Farmers explain their love of country life in terms 
of this passion for life. ‘‘I like to feed hogs,’’ a young 
tenant farmer in Missouri said to me; and an Illinois 
landowner thus explained his refusal to retire to town 
from a farm that paid him scant five per cent. on his 
investment: ‘‘I like to have charge of cattle—and 
women folks and my children.’’ A great educator in 
the Hast ‘‘rested himself after a day in the University 
by the care of his herd of Alderney cows.’’ It was not 
without significance therefore, that the horse-sheds stood 
alongside the country church in former days. The mo- 
mentum which that church still has was given it in the 
time when the church, like the farm, was a cooperative 
endeavor of man and beast. There is not yet sufficient 
evidence that churches are generated in factory towns 
and mining communities, or motivated by gasolene. 

The reason for the religious feeling that a man ex- 
periences in his work with domesticated creatures is 
probably the mystery that abides in their living ways. 
God is unknown to our senses, and we are moved to awe 


DOMESTIC ANIMALS AND PLANTS 101 


by intelligent approaches to the unknown. As we see 
the way of knowledge approach ever nearer to the 
mystery, but never arrive, we feel a fear and a joy that 
are like unto the beginnings of prayer. 

The belief in God as a provider is proper to the people 
who provide. Simple folk, who have little and do not 
accumulate, are prone to depend upon the ecare of a 
mysterious Power. For them the doctrine which ideal- 
izes poverty and dependence is very natural. Our rich 
cities are fascinated by the ideal of religion conferring 
benefits, which is popular nowadays,—and properly, 
too,—but poverty is the more general human expression. 
It has honorable mention in the Beatitudes. Poverty 
is a matter of universal human concern. This century 
of accumulated wealth will pass, but poverty can be re- 
lied on to remain with us. The doctrine of the poor 
will always be that God is a provider; and all farmers 
are providers for themselves and for others. Yet their 
provident efforts never quite overcome the forces of 
weather and moisture; which destroy the crops or make 
the land to produce a surplus, ‘‘as God wills.’’ So 
that a farmer’s wheat-field and his peach-orchard are 
never wholly obedient to his will. They move him the 
more deeply, the more he knows them. Never can he be 
as sure of ‘‘making them go’’ as a mechanic can be sure 
of starting a stalled automobile. No mechanical pre- 
cision is ever attained in the care of subordinate crea- 
tures, because all the unknown forces of the earth and 
the sky range through them. The limits of knowledge 
and the unbounded depths of reality are even better 
known to the farmer than to the scientist. 


102 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


The creatures that gather around the farm-house re- 
fiect also the mysteries of personality. The boy who 
cares for horses or cows sees an amazing reflection of 
himself in their looks, their passions, and their moods. 
They are like enough to men and women to give him 
knowledge of humans which humans would hesitate to 
impart concerning themselves. A Northwest Canadian 
farmer said, ‘‘I like to raise pigs, they ’re so human.’’ 
Their very brutishness, with personality crudely fash- 
ioned and not completed, stirs his curiosity concerning 
men. 

There is a speech of Helen Keller, who was born blind 
and deaf, in which she traces the earliest gropings of 
her intelligence. The first teachers she had were not all 
humans. Before Miss Sullivan’s eloquent fingers spoke 
in the child’s palm, she had learned of fowls, and had 
been taught by the dog, the cat, and the pig in the farm- 
yard. She said: 


I cannot remember a time in my life when animals and 
I were not the best of friends. 

I emerged from babyhood clinging frantically to the rough 
coat of my father’s favorite hunting dog, a beautiful Llewel- 
lyn setter. Together Belle and I explored the garden. To- 
gether we fought our way through box-hedges and rose-trees. 
I am sure Belle was often puzzled to account for my 
peculiarities. She would watch me fall over objects with a 
troubled expression in her kind eyes. With remarkable in- 
telligence she did her best to keep me out of trouble. She 
knew perfectly well that rose-bushes have thorns, and that 
thorns scratch children and tear their frocks. She would 
push and pull in her efforts to dissuade me from going 


DOMESTIC ANIMALS AND PLANTS 1038 


where it was not safe, but when I persisted, despite her most 
energetic resistance, she gave in and faithfully kept her 
place at my side, poking out her head in front to take ob- 
servations and prevent, if possible, a bump or a tumble. 

I loved Belle dearly. She was almost human in her patience 
and forbearance with me when I was only a little savage, 
more ignorant and apparently less capable of learning than 
my faithful companion in the great darkness. 

I was fortunate enough to be born on a Southern farm, 
and I grew up among a multitude of domestic animals. It 
is no exaggeration to say that I spent the greater part of 
the years, before my education began, in the company of my 
barnyard contemporaries. My keen interest in everything 
that had life led my teacher to use the animals on the farm 
_as object lessons. I absorbed language, satisfying my curi- 
osity about living creatures. Hunting for the guinea hens’ 
hidden nests, touching the cool, moist noses and threatening 
horns of the cows, holding the young pigs in my arms, feed- 
ing the great, strutting turkeys and feeling their feathers 
rise, like a flock of birds hovering close to the ground, be- 
ing held on the back of a mule by one of the darky farmers 
when he plowed the cornfield—all these experiences imparted 
the liveliest reality to the words I learned. 

A pair of red bantams was the delight of my heart. They 
were so tame they would stand on my knees billing and 
crowing, aS much at home as if they were on the ground. 
One day the lady bantam most amazingly laid an egg in my 
lap. 


The number and proportion of domestic animals on 
the farms may be taken as coefficient of elements essen- 
tial to the country church. The farmer’s animals may 
not be admitted bodily into the farmer’s church, but 
figuratively they enter. into the foundation of it. The 


104 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


strongest churches are found among farmers in the sec- 
tions in which the hog and the dairy cow, the hen and 
the mule are components of rural society. 

The relation of domestic plants is not so close. The 
church is one remove farther from the plant than from 
the animal. Cotton and corn when raised as single 
crops do not build churches unless the organization of 
the latter is strengthened by sound cooperation. So 
fruit-culture without animal-culture is not religious. 
But the ideal basis for the farmer’s church is the co- 
ordinated crop-and-animal husbandry which is rep- 
resented in diversified farming of the best type. 

The care of domestic animals is a bondage which im- 
poses on the farmer a mode of life peculiar; he is set 
apart from other men by his tendance of cattle, of crops. 
These inferior creatures are productive only on condi- 
tion that they have regular care. In the acts of feeding 
them, currying, cleaning their stables, milking, the 
farmer’s routine is established. As to the domestic 
vegetables, planting, cultivating, spraying, and other 
processes which must be performed at the time ap- 
pointed, by the nature of the growing thing create the 
orderly process of the year. These necessities arise in 
rhythm. The cow must be milked at intervals of twelve 
hours. The horse must be fed three times a aay. Sta- 
bles must be cleaned daily. Orchard trees must be 
sprayed after their blossoming, and at other times ac- 
cording to the parasitic dangers to which they are sub- 
ject. The possibility of variation is slight. 

The farmer has little freedom; he goes from one reg- 
ular process to another. If he has well organized his 


DOMESTIC ANIMALS AND PLANTS = 105 


business, the exactions of one species will fit into the 
leisure time left him by another. Thus a dairy farmer 
is able to employ a labor force that leaves him hours of 
the day free for the cultivation of tobacco or the care 
of fruit-trees. 

The exactions of domestic animals and plants deter- 
mine the organization of the whole industry of agri- 
culture; they contribute the elements of its routine. 
The social institutions of a farming community must 
be adapted to the routine that it is possible for the 
farmers of the neighborhood to follow. A church in a 
dairy country must adjust the times of its services and 
the frequency of its social gatherings to milking time, 
and must not confine people too frequently for long 
evenings who have to arise before dawn. 

The family farm is a result of all the forces that 
_ control the tiller of the soil. It is an institution few 
reformers and theorists understand. Human beings 
would naturally go to live in towns. The American 
farmer lives in no town, but upon the isolated bit of 
land nearest to his barns and to the fields. The ex- 
planation is that the regular rhythm of cattle and of 
crops requires of him this nearness. Any other place 
of residence would put an impossible strain upon him 
and his family, or would mean neglect of the creatures 
which depend upon him for their care, as he depends 
upon their product for his living. 

The family farmer is the most efficient social agent 
of agriculture. Just because the farmer gives personal 
care to animals and plants, that arouses in them the 
exceeding vital response which constitutes profit. With- 


106 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


out his care they would produce as much as the wild 
creatures do, but by his personal tendance they produce 
an excess upon which civilization exists. 

These domestic animals and plants give a profit to 
him who cares for their breeding, feeding, fertilization, 
and protection from parasites and diseases. The kind 
of care they must have is of the sort that an owner can 
give and a hireling will not. The incentive of owner- 
ship seems to be necessary for the breeding of superior 
cattle, for their profitable feeding, and for their pro- 
tection from the many perils which assail them and 
threaten the loss of profit. The pure-bred stock of all 
species live a precarious life. They are capable at the 
best of furnishing a high margin of profit, but this 
profit is always in jeopardy. It can be saved only by 
such care as an owner will give and a wage-earner will 
not. 

At least on an extended scale, reliance upon farm- 
hands, without the supervision of the owner, has proved 
impossible among farmers. In the Eastern States near 
the big cities are many farms owned by men of ample 
means, who hire farm-hands at a wage above what other 
owners can pay. They get the best hands, and employ 
them under the supervision of salaried managers. So 
far I have been unable to hear of any considerable 
number of these farms that have made a financial suc- 
cess; yet alongside of them are farms that survive and 
pay a living though a meager wage. The difference 
is in the motive with which the cattle and the field crops 
are cared for. Only a few very high-priced managers 


DOMESTIC ANIMALS AND PLANTS 107 


have been able to offer an equivalent of the incentive 
of ownership which the farm-owner applies to his task. 
These very high-priced managers exhaust in their 
salaries the profit of the farm. The resident farmer, 
with perhaps one farm-hand or two under his eye, makes 
a tolerable economic success because he is interested as 
an owner in the attainment of that measure of success 
on which profit depends. This is the reason for the 
survival of the family farmer. . It is a reason inherent 
in the nature of domestic animals and plants, which pro- 
duce a surplus only if they have the personal care of 
a man or a woman who owns them. 

This devoted care is the moral root of the agricultural 
industry ; it is the conscious trusteeship for the soil and 
the crops and the beasts. Here is where the preacher 
in the country should apply his exhortation, yet few 
ministers discern the duty of the farmer to his animals, 
or say anything about it. There is in country churches 
a great deal of talk about the care of the ‘‘weak 
brother,’’ but very little about the care of the dependent 
fellow creature. Farmers themselves, by the exigencies 
of their existence, are devoted to an extraordinary degree. 
What will they not do for a sick horse? What pains 
will they refuse to take for sheep in lambing time? 
What steps do they spare themselves in seeking a lost 
heifer? It is true their exertions are prompted by the 
desire for profit, but to stop at that point is to think 
very superficially of the farmer’s motive. He does not 
see an immediate profit in so many dollars. On the con- 
trary, he sees a living creature for which he is respon- 


108 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


sible, whose suffering would make him ashamed. The 
loss of it would cause him to feel degraded in his own 
eyes and the eyes of his neighbors. 

Jesus discerned this trusteeship and made much of 
it, in his parables referring to it very frequently. He 
described the man who went on a journey and left his 
estate in the care of servants. It is evident to the 
reader of the Gospels that the master regarded hu- 
man life as a trust. Should not a country minister 
study the nature of the farmer’s monopoly of land? 
Should not he have pronounced convictions upon the 
obligations inherent in the farm, to maintain the 
fertility of the soil, to preserve the forests, and to build 
up a high record of productiveness in field crops, and 
of excellence in cattle? Where else should the farmer 
excel if not in this? His responsibility to his wife is 
not more positive or measurable than his responsibility 
to the dairy cattle he owns. He has obligations to his 
children which ministers frequently preach about, but 
has he not also obligations to his sheep and poultry? 
Should not the excellence of swine in their use to man- 
kind be extolled in church quite as frequently, if the 
church is among farmers, as the excellence of children 
is to be extolled, in terms of use to mankind? Every 
chureh in the country, therefore, ought to have an 
Opinion so well known that none can escape it, as to 
the industrial performance of dairy cattle, the attain- 
ments of swine, the economic production of poultry. In 
the South the church ought to be an effective center 
of directing the attack upon the boll-weevil, and of 
diversifying the crops. 


DOMESTIC ANIMALS AND PLANTS 109 


These things are not beneath the preacher if it be 
true that man’s tillage of the cotton crop and his care 
of dairy cattle are spiritual experiences. Whoever ob- 
serves a farmer steadily and regards the long hours of 
his immersion in the care of these lesser creatures, owns 
that he has a spiritual experience in these long hours. 
Religion is not something apart from the week-day toil. 
It is an experience within that toil. It is not a salva- 
tion from the world, transacted in an ecstatic moment 
on a rare occasion of revival, but is the diligent per- 
formance of trusteeship during long days and months 
of the master’s absence, when no ecstasy is felt and only 
a sense of duty and remembrance holds the believer 
steady. We may thank God that the devout farmer in 
this is a better man than his preacher, for he behaves 
himself like a religious man during all the days of the 
week, and the country preacher generally practises a re- 
ligion of ecstasy. He preaches the theory of life pivoted 
upon the rare moment. The American farmer has lived 
pretty honestly the religion of creation, but for one 
hundred years his preacher has loudly advocated the 
religion of release. 


CHAPTER VIII 


NEIGHBORS 


chk: indelible mark of rural society is made upon 
the farmer’s church by the absolute acquaint- 
ance of neighbor with neighbor in the country. 
Each person knows about every other person all that 
ean be known. It is characteristic of life on the farm 
- that men are intensely interested in the people within 
driving distance of the farm on which they live, or the 
village in which the life of the farmers centers. This 
was true in the old days when neighborhoods were 
populous and families were large. Nowadays many 
strangers have come into the neighborhood and farmers 
of the old stock have moved away, yet the same intimacy 
in the details of life prevails. very one who lives in 
the country expects to be known by his neighbors to a 
degree that surpasses the intimacy of acquaintance 
prevailing in any other type of community. The rich 
and the poor are mutually acquainted, even though they 
may be alien to one another in habits of life. 

The country population is homogeneous in its daily 
processes; it is regulated by the conditions of the agri- 
cultural industry, in a routine of life common to all; 
so that each man’s life is shot through, day by day, 


with the violet ray of neighborhood intelligence. There 
110 


NEIGHBORS 111 


is no escaping the curiosity of your neighbors. People 
are few, and each person is a concern to all the others. 
Besides, it is the custom for every man to surrender 
himself to his neighbors’ knowledge of him. It goes 
with the agricultural industry. When a man moves to 
the city, he turns his back on his neighbors, on those he 
daily meets; when he lives on the farm, he is expected 
to turn his face to them and to disclose his business to 
all he daily meets. 

It is a question if there is any other force at work in 
the country more powerful than this one. It gives 
character to every factor in the life of the country. It 
puts a limitation upon all alike and shapes the moral 
sentiments of every one living in the community. 

This is what it means to have neighbors. One is in 
a physical nearness to the people on near-by farms; he 
‘is also in a propinquity of mind with them, because he 
and they possess a common knowledge, both mutual and 
objective; that is, they know one another with a 
thoroughness rare among men, and they are daily think- 
ing about the same problems of marketing, sickness and 
health, schools, roads, cattle, and weather. The moral 
problems connected with religion, in these rural com- 
munities, would all be solved if the love of men for one 
another were as overwhelming as their knowledge of one 
another. Then, indeed, they would love their neigh- 
bor as themselves, for in country places people know 
their neighbors almost as well as they know themselves. 
Indeed, a man’s self-knowledge is measured by the 
opinion his neighbors have of him. 

It is almost impossible for any one in a country 


112 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


community to act a part other than the part assigned 
to him in his neighborhood. If his neighbors think 
him a bad man, he expects to be and usually is just as 
bad as they think him. If he is thought good or be- 
nevolent or intelligent, or a sport or a horse-trader or 
a skilled mechanic, in that character he performs. He 
lives up to the idea his neighbors have of him. Years 
ago on Long Island there were in the small towns sea- 
captains who commanded whaling- and fishing- vessels, 
a generation now mostly passed away, with the concen- 
tration of shipping in the bigger cities. The story is 
told about one of these captains, then retired from the sea 
and managing his little farm, to whom approached a 
neighbor hitherto regarded as shiftless. This no-account 
person had been converted in a revival that then con- 
vulsed the village. He took his conversion seriously 
and, as he greeted the old captain, he expected to see a 
new light in the weather-beaten face of the respected 
old man. As if to set himself in a new place in the 
community, he said: ‘‘Captain, I am going to lead a 
new life; I am going to be honest and keep sober and 
pay my debts.’’ To which the captain responded, ‘‘ Who 
told ye so?’’ ‘*‘Why, I have been converted. I have 
given my heart to the Lord.’’ The captain looked the 
new convert steadily in the eye and without change 
of expression said, ‘‘Yer kain’t do it!’’ That passed 
for the end of the incident on Long Island, because it 
was believed that the knowledge of the community 
transcended the grace of the Lord. 

The mutual acquaintance of neighbors is not in- 
fallible. Communities often commit errors. The mind 


NEIGHBORS 113 


of country people proceeds with confidence along the 
line of its estimate of individuals, and on the whole it 
is just and well informed, but it is not superior to 
false accusation nor above the hint of slander. In this 
respect communities develop ideas according to the de- 
gree of good judgment and tolerance possessed by their 
residents. For even in the best communities the stand- 
ards of appreciation of individual conduct fall short 
and some persons are condemned because, while the 
community knows details of individual action, it pos- 
sesses no scale for the weighing of action in the light 
of tolerance, freedom, and progress. The result is that 
the play of universal knowledge throughout a country 
neighborhood, while generally wholesome, has sometimes 
the effect of condemning the independent, bold, or un- 
usual person. Country people, for all their knowledge 
of one another, possess no immunity to resentment or 
hatred or malignity. Of all men they are best able, 
I suppose, to discount prejudice of one against another 
so far as the play of independence goes, but they are 
not more free than other men from self-interest. The 
disposition to love one’s neighbor as oneself and the 
higher ideal of protecting and benefiting one’s neighbor 
are absent too often when universal knowledge plays 
upon the deeds of those who live so near to one another. 

Every country neighborhood is, as a rule, split 
asunder by divisions that are personal and emotional. 
If the human spirit were as big as human experience, all 
country neighborhoods would have a unity co-extensive 
with their knowledge of one another. There would 
then be no duplication of community agencies. But 


114 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


now we have at least two stores in every community, 
and every one prefers the one store to the other. We 
have usually two grain elevators, two lodges at least, 
and almost always more than one church. The place 
in which there is but one church is a place which is 
either extraordinarily obedient to the Christian spirit or 
unusually poor, so that the people cannot afford more 
than one. The cause may even be an indifference to re- 
ligion. The people whose feelings clash and whose 
aversions are organized in a neighborhood conflict have 
no lack of knowledge of one another. They watch one 
another daily on the country roads, they meet one an- 
other in the village streets, they discuss one another con- 
stantly, because they have nothing else to look at or 
talk about but the men and women living in the place. 
But they have no agencies to unite them, nor a teach- 
ing and example effective to restrain the resentments 
and grudges that result from daily experience, so that 
they divide into at least two camps, as a matter of 
course. 

In new communities in the West, for a short time there 
is a universal friendly feeling. The people are all away 
from home. There is no obvious difference to make 
them suspicious of one another in the beginning. There 
is no native inhabitant or old stock to be jealous of the 
new-comers or to be despised by the new-comers. So 
that for a time a pioneer community in the West boasts 
of its democracy and enjoys its like-mindedness. But 
unless it is organized for the exercise of neighborliness, 
fellowship, the forgiveness of offenses, the deliberate 
reconciling of those who suffer from the daily com- 


NEIGHBORS 115 


petitions and conflicts, it may soon be rent by small 
feuds more bitter and more hateful and more active 
than those of an Eastern village. 

This unneighborly contention is to many people un- 
endurable. They can move about easily as strangers 
in a big city, but they cannot endure the hatefulness 
of immediate neighbors. They prefer the homesickness 
of a big town—where impersonal appeals in the theater 
and the moving-picture house, or the passing drama of 
the street engage their minds and make them forget the 
loneliness—to the hatred of one neighbor for another 
and the ostracism of one family by the community. [ 
have no doubt that among the chief causes for the de- 
parture of many families from the country are the 
narrowness of mind and the meanness of spirit which 
separate neighbors whose mutual knowledge is complete. 
To know persons and not to like them is a denial of 
the highest human hope. It takes all the poetry out 
of life. It really denies the Christian faith. A man 
does not prove zealous for the Christian faith who finds 
country neighborhoods evil and unattractive, when to 
know a man is not to approve of him. A large part of 
the call and the charm of the big city is the genial 
humanity that good-naturedly assumes that all men are 
lovable, ‘‘all right,’’ though one would not care to know 
them. In the country place one knows them and is 
expected to withhold his approval from them. The 
paganism of the country community is the cause of the 
feuds that divide one family from another. 

Whatever its evils, the familiarity of neighbor with 
neighbor is a social process we cannot escape. It 


116 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


expresses itself in a curious prying habit and a dis- 
position to inquire candidly into every doing, every pos- 
session, every relationship of the persons within the 
neighborhood. It may be repugnant to some people, 
but nevertheless it goes on. When young men and 
women are caught by the mating instinct, they must 
guard very carefully the details of their conduct, be- 
cause everything they do will be known and published 
by the unflagging curiosity of their neighbors. In a 
big city a young man may sit in a public park with 
his arm about his sweetheart and the passers-by will 
give him scarce a glance. In a country neighborhood, 
if a young man walks on the public road from one house 
to another with a young woman, the fact is published 
from house to house, in the days that follow, and its 
significance is carefully weighed in the scales that every 
mind possesses. It has its due meaning. In remote 
mountain communities the code of conduct is as rigid 
and exacting as the behavior of persons at the court 
of St. James or in the ceremonies of the Vatican. 
There is always just one way to do anything and a 
departure from that way has a meaning invariable. 
The limited experience of the neighbors in isolated com- 
munities makes them seem intolerant, but they are 
adhering to the code of conduct they understand. 
The peculiarity of country communities is not a low 
standard of life or a meanness of spirit, but a code of 
manners based upon limited knowledge of the world. 
The penetration of the whole community with the white 
light of universal knowledge and its attendant curi- 
osity, with the consequent judgment upon every man 


NEIGHBORS 117 


day by day, renders the task of the minister, the school- 
teacher, or the public-health nurse in a rural community 
very difficult. I have known devoted women, going to 
live and work in the country, to sacrifice the game of 
eards which they had enjoyed for years of an evening 
and to give up the occasional dance that has been in- 
nocent enough, just because the people in the country 
had not scales in which cards or dancing could be 
weighed with approval. In order to render service 
among country people and to enjoy their friendly 
approval, these women sacrificed cheerfully pleasures 
that were to them of less value than the esteem of 
their country neighbors. The problem of rural social 
organization, and especially the problem of the country 
church, is bound up with the fact of universal inescap- 
able knowledge. He who lives in the country must 
realize that his doors and windows are open all the 
time. Whatever he does, from dawn to dark and even 
at midnight, will be known next day throughout the 
whole neighborhood. 

This familiarity of neighbor with neighbor has a 
physical boundary. It extends to all the farms whose 
owners are, by the conditions of trade and by the move- 
ments of the agricultural industry, in the habit of meet- 
ing. These farmers and the members of their families 
who regularly and periodically meet, these are they who 
are acquainted with one another. So that the neigh- 
borhood extends as far from the natural trading center 
as the weekly drive to market or the daily journey for 
the delivery of milk. Nowadays, with motor trans- 
portation, the boundaries of the community are some- 


118 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


what extended, but the hauling of farm produce and not 
the pleasure ride in the family automobile is the deter- 
mining factor in acquaintance. One finds neighbors 
best acquainted along the road by which they pass 
weekly, perhaps daily, to the market center. The people 
who thus are bound together by mutual acquaintance 
constitute the neighborhood. These are they who ought 
to love one another as fully as they know one another. 
These are the people who ought, and in the old time 
used, to sustain the country church. The chief service 
of a church is to enable them to love one another as well 
as they know one another. 

How dear are neighbors? Dearer than kindred or 
friends or children, when, added to the genial ties of 
daily intercourse, there are the bonds of religious duty 
and joy. Then one loves his neighbors as himself. 
Neighbors are as dear as personality is. 

The love of neighbors requires a symbol in the sight 
of allmen. Small towns need a public and visible token 
of neighborliness. And in many communities through- 
out the country—so many as to be enumerated now by 
the United States Department of Agriculture *—there 
are community houses erected for a useful purpose but 
always with something in their architecture to indicate 
the genial, homely love one has for those who are on the 
same level with himself. For instance, at Novato, Cali- 


1 See four pamphlets published by U. 8. Department of Agricul- 
ture: “Rural Community Buildings in the U. 8S.” (Bulletin 
825); “Plans of Rural Community Buildings” (Bulletin 1178) ; 
“Organization of Rural Community Buildings” (Bulletin 1192) ; 
“Uses of Rural Community Buildings’ (Bulletin 1274). 


in a. ee ee ee ee ee 


NEIGHBORS 119 


fornia, is a community house erected, as a tribute to the 
neighborly spirit of this town, by the only Protestant 
church in the place. The whole house is pervaded by the 
spirit of the pastor, the Rev. Charles Christensen. It is 
ample in its provision of a score of rooms for neighbor- 
hood purposes. It contains a theater, and, besides, a 
generous lobby with a fireplace. It has two parlors in 
which committees or societies may meet. It has a great 
kitchen from which meals may be served to any room in 
the house, large or small. The stage of the theater has 
the widest span of any in that section of California and 
is furnished for the presentation of plays. It is often 
used as the platform of the orchestra when the audito- 
rium is filled with dancers. The exterior of the build- 
ing, while modest in all its lines, is gracious and 
beautiful, expressing welcome in the aspect it shows to 
the visitor from any direction, as it stands in a conspicu- 
ous position in the village. 

At Vernon, New Jersey, is a community house erected 
for the parish house of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, but 
for many years used freely as a community house, under 
the control of the Board of Trade. It has always been 
sensitive to the spirit of the neighborhood and devoted 
to the most popular regulation and enjoyment. 

A good illustration of the simplest form community 
house is a pavilion in the yard of the church at Kreutz 
Creek, near York, Pennsylvania. It is an unheated, open 
shelter, available only in the summer, under the care of 
the sexton of the church, who lives in a house on the 
church grounds. The expense connected with it, aside 
from the original cost of construction, is negligible. Its 


120 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


repair or up-keep will never be a tax upon the com- 
munity, made up of men skilled in all the homely trades. 

At Sergeantsville, New Jersey, is a one-time hotel 
which was for years a road-house used by those driving 
to market in that populous farming country. At the 
coming of prohibition it was purchased for the Methodist 
Episcopal Church, by a Trenton business man, Mr. 
Frank J. Apple, who owns a farm in the community. 
The Rev. J. M. Jocqueath managed it personally for 
about five years. He first rebuilt the interior, to give 
ampler space for meeting-rooms, library, and church 
parlors, leaving a few guest-rooms for hire to residents in 
the community and a small suite for the caretaker to 
live in. In spite of the difficult problem of whether or 
not to permit dancing here, this community house has 
been a success and a satisfaction to every one except to 
the burdened minister himself. It stands as a pledge of 
the loyalty of the Methodist Episcopal Church to the 
spirit of brotherly love, in an old community not lacking 
in divisions. 

This new movement of the religious spirit is expressing 
itself in all parts of the nation, in obedience to no central 
impulses, except those released by the World War. Its 
roots, however, are deeper than those of war. Indeed, 
it expressed itself in the ‘‘huts’’ erected by service 
agencies for the soldiers at the front. It goes back at 
least fifty years in the experience of the Young Men’s 
Christian Association and is an expression of the teach- 
ings of the churches which often the churches themselves 
are unwilling to embody in material form. At the be- 
ginning of the World War the churches in some West- 


NEIGHBORS 121 


ern Sta‘es were caught unawares by the public desire to 
minister to the soldiers. The Red Cross was a society 
alert for emergencies. In some communities of the far 
West, in the beginnings of the Red Cross work in 1917, 
the churches were opposed to it because in the raising 
of funds this society got the peoplestogether and provided 
music for dancing, to which the churches were on prin- 
ciple opposec. Before the end of the war, however, the 
spirit of joint service brought all these communities 
together in united action for their sons and brothers at 
the front. It cannot be doubted that the war gave form 
and power to this movement of brotherhood. 

The community house that expresses this spirit must 
be a place where saints and sinners can meet. There- 
fore, it differs from the parish house that preceded it, in 
that it is managed generally by a board independent of 
any one church. The examples just mentioned show 
that the community house can be provided by a church 
if its spirit is tolerant and its brotherly kindness in- 
cludes all. Probably the community houses of the future 
w.ll more frequently be -under the indirect control of 
the church than under its immediate ownership and 
care. These houses, symbols of the Christian spirit 
and universal love, must contain certain uniform fea- 
tures, such as a place for cooking and eating together 
outside domestic limits, ample for the use of all who 
may attend. Beyond this simple provision each house 
must comprise the cluster of facilities needed in that par- 
ticular place, such as ample room for lectures, for games, 
for the showing of motion pictures, and in some com- 
munities a gymnasium and a basket-ball ground. The 


122 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


community house must always be a means of quick re- 
sponse to the need of brotherly intercourse. 

This spirit is not new among country people. Wher- 
ever there are in the country families who worship God 
and are attentive to the Divine Spirit, the people are ac- 
customed to caring for the weaker members of the com- 
munity and meeting emergencies. The neighborly spirit 
is not only a latent kindliness as extensive as acquaint- 
ance is: it forms its ruts and grooves of custom as firm 
and sure as institutions are, in an old rural community 
that has heard the Gospel. The value of the community 
house is only in its embodiment of this spirit in a 
material form, and in the provision of those facilities 
necessary for the homely uses of fellowship. 

The reason for building community houses is found 
in the fact that many strangers come and go, in and out 
of the rural community. Acquaintance is not so uni- 
form or so universal as it was. There must be found a 
means outside the household for democratic fellowship 
and neighborly expression such as would not lead to in- 
vitations to dinner or culminate in intermarriage. In 
the old days a farmer might expect his son to marry the 
daughter of any neighbor. This is not so to-day, with 
Protestants and Catholics living in the same commu- 
nity. With foreigners from another stock, and moun- 
taineers from a hostile and peculiar section of the coun- 
try, dining together or intermarriage is unwelcome and 
is often regarded as impossible. If the community, 
therefore, is to be neighborly and men are to love their 
neighbors as themselves, they must erect some house that 
expresses neighborly but not kinship privileges. The 


NEIGHBORS 123 


community house has thus become a more precise organ 
of obedience to the Scriptural command and the modern 
spirit than our fathers possessed in their own homes. 
We practise in these days an obedience which kinship 
would not require, nor the people of a homogeneous 
community expect to perform. 


CHAPTER Ix 


ART AND PLAY 


can Protestant churches are should organize 

their community program first in forms of play! 
The reason given by them is usually this: that their 
recreational programs are intended as a discipline to 
save their young men and women from sin. This is a 
sound reason. When a church officer used to say, ‘‘We 
organize this work to keep the young men from the 
saloon and the billiard hall,’’ he meant that the mystery 
of sin must be humanly administered. He did not as 
yet face the full meaning of what he had done. He 
acted under distress and in an expedient way. 

Very often recreational work is done by church people 
without reasons being given. The most common form is 
the church dinner or supper. Few people are so austere 
that they do not eat together. There is little dispute 
among church members about church dinners, so far 
as they are used for a recreational and not a monetary 
purpose. 

The next most frequent organization of play is in 
socials, as they are called. These gatherings for amuse- 
ment and the extending of acquaintance are well nigh 
universal among the smaller churches of the country. 


They are largely the work of committees of the Sunday- 
124 


Get that churches so austere as the Ameri- 


ART AND PLAY 125 


school classes and young people’s societies. Some 
churches are organized for the systematic presentation 
to the community of a hospitable spirit. The purpose 
of social gathering is talk; conversation and free inter- 
course are made possible for those who have little to 
say and are shy by reason of their isolated work and 
rustic reserve. The long silences in which men and 
women live in the country, whatever their task, prepare 
them for the lively meetings in which they can talk and 
discuss, if the ice is only broken. 

Some churches have deliberately undertaken to cele- 
brate the holidays of the round year. A great English 
rector gave thanks for the calendar of the church, be- 
cause in the course of the year, he said, the congrega- 
tion was reminded of every phase of human experience. 
The lives of the saints to whom days are made holy 
furnished to him a complete index to human emotion. 
But American churches have been reserved in their use 
of holidays, even of Christmas and Easter. Beginning 
with no saints’ days and indifferent as most of them 
. were to the civil holidays, they have been slow to value 
ereat emotional celebrations. There is among them an 
increase in the intensity of celebrating the birth of our 
Lord and the day of His resurrection—ancient festivals 
both. They do not adequately make use of Thanks- 
giving Day even now, and the holidays of the year such 
as Decoration Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and the 
birthday of Washington pass without notice in most of 
the small congregations. This is a real loss, for the 
value of these days to the religious spirit would be very 
creat. 


126 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


We believe it would be well if American churches 
should sanctify the special days of rest of the American 
year. These churches are organized upon the recogni- 
tion of the commonwealth, to which they offer a supple- 
ment but not a substitute. Therefore the churches 
should stress the celebration of holy days which are 
dear to all the people. These days are consecrated to 
the awe and fear, the thanksgiving and the dependence 
of the people upon God, Who gives to mankind out of 
his mysterious providence great men and deliverances 
from fear. 

The last two decades have seen many churches repre- 
sented on the athletic field. Protestant as well as Catho- 
lic congregations have sent out their teams to compete 
in the non-commercial games. Not a few ministers have 
seized on this expedient as a measure by which to 
counteract Sunday recreation. I remember well the 
first minister who organized a baseball team, exacting 
of each member a promise that he would not play ball 
on Sunday so long as he was on the church team. 
The victories won by this team were regarded as provi- 
dential support of the minister’s program. In the small 
cities some churches are organizing gymnasiums for 
baseball in the winter and for public gatherings of a 
general sort. These gymnasiums may be used by the 
church on many occasions. Some of them are simple 
buildings without beauty but suited to rough and joyous 
use by the playful spirits of the congregation. | 

Of music one can say no less than that it is a highest 
expression of the spirit to which we are referring. Mu- 


ART AND PLAY. 127 


Sic is the voice of man concerning the mystery of 
existence. ‘‘For music flings on mortals its infinite dis- 
dain.’’ It is the ultimate expression of the feeling 
which words cannot express. Music is that one of the 
arts to which the crudest churches are converted. They 
may resist all other appeals of beauty, but they do not 
deny music. It alone was not forgotten by those stern 
Highlanders who became lodged in the Appalachians 
when the westward trails which went that way at first 
were abandoned. They retained the ballads of the 
Elizabethan English towns from which they had come. 
They still preserve their love of song in neighborhood 
‘‘sings’’ to which men journey from afar and stay all 
day, joining in the volume of melody with a satisfaction 
that is pathetic. For the tunes are meaningless, and 
the words they sing are shallow. The spirit of music 
remains in the American people, from whom all the 
other arts were removed. 

It would be well if more American churches followed 
the example of that at DuPage, Illinois, where Matthew 
Brown MeNutt and his gifted wife began in 1900 a 
social ministry, under adverse conditions, with no more 
than the organization of a church choir. In ten years’ 
time they had from that beginning unfolded a program 
that was so rich and varied as to prove contagious among 
American churches. 

While the farmers’ churches use such erotic verse and 
sensuous music as are found in the hymn-books dis- 
tributed to them by irresponsible evangelists, they can- 
not hope for a development of their churches. Christian 


128 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


spirituality is one and indivisible. It requires expres- 
sion of faith and aspiration, not of rhythm and ecstasy. 
One of the first acts of a responsible pastor, who designs 
to give his life to his people as an earnest of the divine 
life for them, will be to replace the sentimental drivel 
and thumping music of the commercialized hymn-books 
with one of the excellent hymnals that are published by 
his denomination, or by any of the publishing houses 
which specialize in the supply of church music. 
Dramatic art is organized in many a church in the 
giving of a play at least once a year. The development 
of this new form of recreation began in the work of Pro- 
fessor A. G. Arvold at the University of North Dakota,? 
but it now has fairly general expression. Publishing 
houses have within a few years poured forth a profusion 
of one-act plays, amateur plays, and pageants. It would 
seem that Americans are taking hold with eagerness of 
the art of expression upon the stage. A change has come 
in our whole feeling of life that we can express only 
in this manner. Even when the artistic value of the 
performance is small, it may give great satisfaction to 
actors and audience. I saw ‘‘Everyman’”’ presented in 
a county-seat town forty miles from the railway by 
rustic boys and girls. It was mostly crude and provin- 
cial in utterance, but for two hours this serious per- 


1“Hymnal for American Youth,” Century Co.; “Alleluia,” 
Westminister Press; “Fellowship Hymns,” Association Press; 
“Hymns for the Living Age,” and “Hymns for the Open,” Cen- 
tury Co. 

2The Little Country Theater,” A. G. Arvold. Macmillan. 


ART AND PLAY 129 


formance, without an opportunity for laughter, held the 
close attention of an audience which crowded the 
church. | 

This brief review is intended to summarize develop- 
ments of the past two decades. How great the change 
is in accepted standards, how many prohibitions and 
constraints have been discarded or forgotten, it would 
be impossible to say. One can measure the change by 
the positive observation that ten years ago the churches 
enjoyed beauty only in music. Art and play were 
known to them only in the decorous performance of the 
choir. | 

But now a profusion of expressions of the same spirit, 
which looks into the mystery of sin and righteousness, 
give a measure of the transformation in the American 
spirit. It is not a measure of our national wealth, for 
these recreations are extending as much among the poor 
as the rich. It is probably the expression of a philos- 
ophy of the life of cities, for the extension of the system 
of play is slower in the country than in the city. But 
the chief means for the discipline of men in right be- 
havior is the community house. 

In all this progress of recent years, we have given our- 
selves little explanation and much performance. We 
have done what the situation required and postponed 
the moralizing of it. The Young Men’s and Young 
Women’s Christian Associations have been professed 
servants of the churches in pioneering this field. The 
Boy Scouts have developed in the United States, and 
the use of their methods goes far beyond the bounds of 


130 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


their reported organization. Probably for every troop 
of Boy Scouts that reports to headquarters, there are 
two or three groups which use the methods of the Scouts 
but serve the purpose of some church or high school. 
These societies have developed the doctrine as well as 
the practice of play. The quest is of beauty in con- 
duct, as well as in person. They seek good behavior in 
the face of temptation and vice, in the mysterious acts 
of life. They desire to excel in body and spirit and to 
enjoy happiness. In default of explanation by them- 
selves, the present writer believes that the object in all 
this work is the same. It is an expression of the Puritan 
spirit which, recognizing the mysterious character of sin 
and righteousness, seeks to establish a discipline for the 
conduct of the young in the unpredictable events of 
life. These are the means of preparing young men and 
women for achievement and success. 

The purpose of this book is not to provide detailed 
. programs, which are offered in profusion by agencies 
that attend to no other matter. The World War 
popularized the practices of recreation, and the societies 
that served in maintaining the morale of the soldiers 
under their awful trial are ready to-day to instruct those 
who inquire as to technique. Community Service, Inc., 
the Knights of Columbus, and the organizations already 
named are the best advisers as to the way of developing 
a community program of play. The public schools are 


8“The Church and the People’s Play,’ Henry A. Atkinson. 
Pilgrim Press. 1916. “Education through Play” (1916) and 
“Play and Recreation in the Open Country” (1914), H. S. 
Curtis. Macmillan, 


ART AND PLAY 131 


away beyond the churches in their practice of the philos- 
ophy of play. Many high schools have costly equip- 
ment for play. The colleges and universities confer 
upon their students a distinguished preference over 
other young persons, in the elaborate provision for their 
leisure. Costly facilities for physical exercise, games, 
and organized sports, are put at the disposal of the 
humblest student in these schools. My purpose here is 
to interpret this field to country people and to the minis- 
ters and officers of their churches, for the boy and the 
girl in the country are as yet unfurnished with adequate 
means of recreation. Their opportunities for experience 
that will protect them against temptations are not equal 
to those of the boy and the girl in the factory town, city, 
or college community. 

Chief among the reasons which commend themselves 
to the austerely religious man who approves of play and 
its costly furnishings is that play is self-expression. 
It is the free movement of the spirit. Work is required 
of us; however willingly we labor our work is a routine. 
Its exactions are irksome. But play is the outspeaking 
of self. It is the free movement of personality. There- 
fore play is moral: it is at the same time artistic. The 
Protestant churches which seek the soul and desire to 
conserve the personality have a logical right, therefore, 
to cherish the soul in its expressions and to free it from 
routine so far as in an orderly way it may be made free. 
This is done best on the playground and at the meeting- 
place. 

The other great reason for the games and the expres- 
sions of the playground is the necessity of adequate rural 


132 THE FARMER’S CHURCH ’ 


organization. The wilderness which we conquered in the 
last century made us a solitary, reserved, and independ- 
ent people. We find it hard to merge our action with 
that of others. Under compulsion in big business men 
have blended their work and subordinated themselves. 
But the unwilling act is inferior in its teaching value to 
the voluntary movement on the playground, in the dra- 
matic hall, or in the social meeting. There we can ex- 
press ourselves in joyous cooperation with those who 
follow the same way of life. Young men and women who 
have taken part in athletic games are able to behave dur- 
ing all their after lives in greater ease with others. They 
know how to make compromises without moral sur- 
render; they know how to sacrifice themselves without 
humiliation. This knowledge is of increasing value as 
the nation becomes compactly organized and as our 
greater population must adjust itself—in business, in 
education—to new ends and bear in common new bur- 
dens. The experience of play acquaints us with one 
another in acts of obedience, subordination, mutual 
surrender, and the alternative experience of leadership 
and following. We find our place with our own group 
and are afterward ready to adjust ourselves without 
loss of character to any group. 

There is a value in public games that religious workers 
should recognize. Young men and women see one an- 
other in the contests without prudery or shame. They 
become accustomed to a regulated liberty which dissolves 
much of the unclean and erases the unseemly from life. 
Miss Jane Addams has said, ‘‘The games are the best 


ART AND PLAY 133 


answer to vice, and play consumes the lust of vice.’’ 
Since the churches live as stewards of the unknown, they 
have come reverently but without real hesitation to a 
very large use of play just as in an earlier day they 
used music for the discipline of the spirit in the way 
unknown to young feet.’ 


CHAPTER X 


‘““GOOD ENOUGH’’ 


HE poverty of the farmers’ churches in the - 
greater agricultural areas is in sharp contrast 

to the affluence of the churches attended by 
business people, by students and the dwellers in college 
towns, and by the inhabitants of cities. Often the lack 
of a small sum of not more than ten dollars in the 
treasury of the congregation forbids for many months 
the completion of a useful improvement. The church 
is straitened to pay its preacher—is in debt to him, as 
a matter of fact—and in the face of poverty cannot build 
a decent fence, or cut the weeds on the church property. 
It was not so in the days of the household farmer’s 
ehurch. Indeed, there are a few farmers’ churches— 
many in limited sections—that are able to maintain the 
church property in beautiful order, to support a janitor 
or sexton on full time, and, as years pass, to enlarge or 
rebuild the church edifice. Would that these churches 
were more numerous: and that the standards of our 
grandfathers, who had for their day abundance to give, 
prevailed to-day! The usual farmer’s church of the 
middle West, Northwest, and Southwest was erected 
as an expedient. It was suitable to the needs of home- 


steaders. It is already out of date. It is often out of 
134 


“GOOD ENOUGH” 135 


place, that is, located at no present center of community 
life. It is shabby. Never was well kept. Has nothing 
to engage the attentions of the next generation. 
Poverty came upon the farmer after the Civil War, 
in no absolute form,—he had food and shelter,—but 
in the rising tide of wants which the towns and cities 
like flood-gates let in upon the land, in which he could 
not swim or row. He suffered from comparative 
poverty. He had everything but cash, and cash was of 
all things most desired, for the purchase of store goods 
at protected prices. So his church had to go without 
being rebuilt or even enlarged, when all city churches 
put on modern architectural garments. Now this shabby 
old age is idealized and the proposal to rebuild country 
churches sometimes awakens the indignation of members. 
How often one sees in a farmer’s church second-hand 
pews, discarded by a city church, a pulpit alien to the 
place and obviously handed down, hymn-books with the 
name of another congregation upon them, and an organ 
that has done duty elsewhere! And the people boast 
of it. They pride themselves upon their success as re- 
ceivers of old ecclesiastical clothes. Somebody’s old: 
piano, a heater of honored connections, chairs with a 
distinguished past are achievements in their eyes. Yet, 
on reflection, one must admit that their mendicancy is 
no more than the idealization of their necessity. Farm- 
ers have been poor. 
_ The church is built out of surplus. Its gifts are evi- 
dence of abundance. It fares ill among people who have 
neither surplus nor abundance. Even when a com- 
munity long impoverished attains prosperity, its mem- 


136 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


bers have for a generation the mind of paupers. They 
hide their wealth, invest it in land, live poorly, and pass 
their days in terror of loss. 

The automobile has been an object-lesson in expensive 
living. Of all farmers’ properties, it is the form of 
consumers’ goods most perishable. It depreciates more 
rapidly than horses or carriages, or than farm wagons. 
Said a mountaineer, ‘‘A man ean soon ‘fifty cents’ him- 
self to death with a Ford.’’ Its first cost seems enor- » 
mously high, and the upkeep is disquieting; but it has 
commended itself to farmers everywhere as a necessary 
vehicle. The habit of motoring has accustomed the 
farmer to free spending. It has introduced him to 
daily experience of the profit made possible by con- 
sumption, for he is now nearer his market. He can 
economize in use of time. His wits are sharpened upon 
his neighbors’ faces more often. On the whole, a genera- 
tion inclined at the beginning to the fear of poverty 
and the joy of economy have learned to pay and to 
spend. In a few places they have learned to give. 
Most farmers have that lesson yet to learn. 

It should not be a matter of surprise that farmers 
and villagers put up with shifty expedients and tolerate 
arrangements that will barely do. The tiller of the soil 
is creating something out of nothing. He is not always 
an artist. He is struggling with forces which frequently 
are too strong for him. He must be content if he at- 
tains a success bare of ornament and devoid of beauty. 
If he is a lumberman his task is to hew down the forest 
and get from the ruin of nature’s noble work a salable 
product in logs or ties or telephone poles. When that 


“GOOD ENOUGH” 137 


is done he stops, leaving the lands once ennobled with 
the growth of centuries a rotting desolation. If he is 
plowing the land he must be content with the cultiva- 
tion that will produce a crop, but has not the time to 
fight the weeds and to cut the fence corners. Whatever 
pays, he will do. He cannot hire help for increasing the 
beauty of the landscape or to destroy unsightly things. 
He cannot even afford the time to fight the pests that 
threaten his crops of next year. 

This pragmatical spirit goes through all the farm 
economy. Its rule is more rigid now that farming is 
commercialized and every day’s work must be reckoned 
in profit or loss, than it was in the old days when farm- 
ers subsisted on their own products without selling in 
the public markets. Then the farm-house had surplus 
' labor and the farmer of good taste and fine feeling could 
send his men to burn brush, cut weeds, and build stone 
fences. Now that farmers are attentive to the questions 
of labor income, a hard, prosaic economy controls the 
ecountry-side and forbids any excellence except that 
which will pay. 

The American farmer is straining himself, moreover, 
upon the task of possessing much land. The increasing 
price of land tempts him to keep more under tillage than 
he has the hands to cultivate. His mind is attentive to 
speculative profit or set upon the establishment of a 
large estate. He is forever thinking of a future profit 
and never solicitous of present beauty or excellence. 
He fertilizes the soil unwillingly and too often is re- 
luctant to undertake those processes that increase the 
economic value of the soil. Naturally, he contents him- 


138 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


self with expedients that are ‘‘good enough’’ for the 
present. 

This deferred excellence of country life has become 
an ideal, accepted in pioneer days and in the period of 
speculation, which has not yet ended. In the middle 
West it is regarded as a necessity of life. Men wear this 
state of mind as they wear overalls day after day, or old 
clothing ; and, like all necessities when they are accepted, 
it has become an ideal state. Men think well of this 
homely living. They think slightingly of the excellence 
of appearance. They despise beauty and they are in- 
dignant at a demand for expenditure upon more costly 
things. 

The Protestant churches are so responsive to popular 
feeling that they too idealize the straitened and parsi- 
monious way. Schools have official advocates of im- 
provement. The tightening lines of educational organi- 
zation and the whip of standardization quicken the pace 
of the common schools in the country. But the farmer 
is always reluctant to improve his schools, even in the 
matter of their appearance. Church people content 
with things ‘‘good enough’’ are sometimes a drag on the 
improvement of the schools. The result is that in their 
public equipment country communities are dull and un- 
attractive. The people in them, used to ugly things, 
expect nothing better and cannot be aroused to under- 
take fitting improvements. 

Unfortunately the influence of the city has offered no 
help. City people look upon the farmer’s parsimony 
as a matter of course. They think nothing will do for 
themselves that has not a tribute to beauty and a touch 


“GOOD ENOUGH” 139 


of luxury, but they take it for granted that people in 
villages and on the farms will have neither beauty nor 
luxury. Life in the country is expected to be tasteless, 
colorless, and rough-formed. So that the influences in 
the nation that make for improvement of human life 
are effective in the city but ineffective in the country. 

I think it is fair to say that even between farm places 
and village streets there is a further contrast. One be- 
gins to see as he travels through the middle West and 
the South many attractive farm places. The farm 
women are beautifying their domains and demanding 
fresh paint, close-cut lawns, and massed shrubbery. 
Within the house they are securing, besides the tele- 
phone and running water which the men might be ex- 
pected to install, modern furniture and indoor plumbing. 
The automobile, the pioneer project in the expenditure 
of money, has taught many lessons and brought home 
many ideas. The place where the farmer lives has 
taken on some of the gloss of the bright, shining sur- 
face of the family car. But the small village through 
which the train passes is still too often a sordid place. 
The excellent things have come more slowly to the vil- 
lage than to the farm.t In certain sections of the 
country, especially in the South, the small town is 
hideous. The landscape shows many pretty and well- 
planned farm-houses smiling brightly in the midst of 
well-kept fields. And then appears a shapeless, dis- 
orderly village, with store fronts unpainted, streets un- 
paved, dirt and disorder ruling the common life. 


1“Town Planning for Small Communities,” Charles S. Bird. 
Appleton. “Rural Improvement,” Frank A. Waugh. Judd. 


140 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


So long as religion is an expression of the spirit of 
God in the people themselves, just so long will it 
register their sense of the worth of life. We must wait 
until the American religion sets a higher value upon the 
life of every man, for those expressions of an excellent 
way to appear in the road on which the poor must 
walk, and in the furnishings of the church to which 
the sinner is invited. Not until that time comes will the 
music of country churches, for instance, be better than 
the thoughts of the people. So long as country people 
are content with things that barely serve, we shall have 
the hymn-books lying upon the seats of the country 
church and bestrewing the floor, scarcely worth the 
picking up and unclean to the cultured imagination. 
They .are ‘‘good enough’’ for a people who for two 
hundred years have been wandering away from the 
land of English ballads and the home of German 
harmonies. 

The remedy for this parsimony of life will, I suppose, 
come as good roads have come. Nothing more for- 
bidding was known in our American life twenty years 
ago than the unimproved country road that passed the 
farm-house. Men and women of faith harangued inthe 
nineties in vain, demanding the improvement of the 
country road. Who has forgotten the exhortations that 
centered about the King split-log drag? This simple 
and effective device for smoothing the country road was 
held before the farmers of the middle West, and the 
instances in which it was used were extensively adver- 
tised by public speakers before the days of the automo- 
bile; but so far as producing many imitations of Mr. 


“GOOD ENOUGH” 141 


King and his drag is concerned, the roads were 
generally unimproved; until a new incentive and a new 
administration entered. The automobile provided the 
incentive and the state with the reénforcement of 
national subsidies found the administration. 

Now there runs into nearly every county in the land 
a perfect, modern road; and as a result the old, un- 
graded farmers’ roads are no longer ‘‘good enough.’’ 
The dirt roads are now graded and crowned by the zeal- 
ous hands of farmers who know what a good road is. 
An example of the good roads built by the State has 
penetrated into the knowledge of every farm-house, and 
the imitation of them has seized upon the imagination of 
competent men in every local government. Is there 
anything more beautiful in the country to-day than the 
state road? It glides through the sordid villages like 
a curve of beauty. It lies upon the face of hill and 
valley as a symbol of distances and purpose, a token 
of the nation’s conception of itself. It is like a caress 
laid lovingly upon the face of nature, recognizing the 
aspects of the land but claiming all parts for order and 
excellent living. 

Is not the remedy for the prosaic and the second- 
hand, for the parsimonious spirit of the farmer, to be 
found in a national spirit? Even the churches, which 
idealize local experience, will yield in time to the limi- 
tation of new patterns of beautiful and comfortable 
houses erected for the worship of God, to which people 
come from their less distinguished homes. In time the 
church itself, we may hope, will excel as the school al- 
ready excels in many communities. Standing out over 


142 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


the level of the houses in the flat and prosaic wards of 
great cities, one sees uplifted the dimensions of the 
school building, conforming to a new American archi- 
tecture and shaped after the best models known to the 
State office of education. Is it too much to expect that 
the Protestant church of the future will be erected in 
obedience to an external beauty and modeled upon lines 
that represent something of the conception that the 
American people have of themselves ? 

So Jong as the church is ‘‘good enough’’ for mere sur- 
vival, it will not preserve the religion of Jesus Christ. 
Parsimony cannot be the rule of Christian growth, but 
rather sacrifice and aspiration. Too many ministers 
and church officers, intent upon extending their work 
to the utmost limit of breathless zeal, have consented to 
worship in houses upon which they bestow only enough 
attention to keep them from falling down. We have 
passed the time when this is necessary. If we continue 
to house our faith in buildings furnished with second- 
hand pews, used-over pulpits, and worn-out carpets, 
we shall deny the very faith itself. There is no need 
now of zeal concentrated upon reaching every commu- 
nity, because most of the communities in the land have 
churches enough and to spare. The time has come to 
express Christianity in beauty and rich gifts. There is 
no need now for farmers to strain themselves for the 
possession of more land; the duty that confronts the 
modern farmer is to make his land excel in production 
and to enrich it for his son and grandson after him. 
He should obey a social spirit that recognizes the land 
as a national possession held for the time in trust. The 


“GOOD ENOUGH” 143 


spirit of Christ is expressed in His parables, in the per- 
fection of His seamless robe, the charm of His conduct. 
Christianity cannot live forever in second-hand clothes. 
It must express itself in high living and perfected ex- 
ternals of life. 

I am convinced that the low esteem in which the indi- 
vidual is held in the United States, in the prevailing 
standards of mediocrity, is a violation of the Chris- 
tian spirit and a restraint upon the gospel which Jesus 
Christ gave to the world. As a nation we idealize the 
inferior man. We have been poor. We think with com- 
placency of the meager life of poor people. If we have 
a competence, we still are content with inadequate and 
starveling materials of the spirit. We repress, we re- 
buke, we scorn the man or woman who insists upon some- 
thing better. We ery out against the person who desires 
more excellence in books or architecture, or in the treat- 
ment of children, or in the order of divine worship. 
The reason is that we make an umpire of the low-grade 
man. Perhaps this is the way democracy must needs 
work out its destiny. But if inferiority and parsimony 
are the destiny of democracy, then there is in the Chris- 
tian gospel another revolution to come, for the essence 
of the teaching of Christ is obedience to the high and 
the fine, and the imitation of the sacrificial spirit which 
is possessed only by the few. The Christian religion 
involves an aspiration after the best, which the life of 
small communities to-day represses and denies. 


CHAPTER XI 


RURAL SPIRITUALITY 


NOR a number of years the writer of this book 


was concerned with the weakness and disorder 

of the country church, and with the lack of in- 
stitutions that a: church needs to reinforce it. But for 
the past five years he has felt a deeper discouragement 
because of the low spiritual tone of country life. 
Relatively speaking, the people in small American com- 
munities have not shared in the growth of the country. 
The United States progressed far in this century in cul- 
tural privileges made possible by the advance of science, 
the enjoyment of bodily health and comfort, the growth 
of the arts of communication and transportation, and 
intercourse with the people of Europe and Asia. In- 
fluential sections of the population have become tolerant, 
modest, critical-minded, objective in thinking, and 
humane. Many Americans entertain a hope that 
sources of suffering and injustice may be removed and 
human life freed from particular afflictions, the causes 
of which are within human eontrol. Americans in small 
communities have not generally had a part in this 
spiritual development, and those dwellers in small towns 
who have experienced the change of standard are unable 


to express themselves locally as their spiritual kindred 
144 


RURAL SPIRITUALITY 145 


in cities do, because the small town will not have a su- 
perior spokesman. The farm population has therefore 
suffered a corresponding loss in that it has not kept its 
mind open to the growing spirituality of the time. 

The farm population shows even spiritual decline, by 
reason of the expulsion from the rural community of so 
many exceptional minds. The very persons and fam- 
ilies whose genius would have brought God near have 
been constrained to go elsewhere,—to the West, to 
Canada, to the city,—and without them there is dis- 
torted vision, loss of faith, and no humanity. The evi- 
dences of this spiritual decline press upon every one 
who spends a week or a month in a country place, which 
one or two generations ago was known for its worship 
on Sunday and hopefulness and industry on week-days. 
Instead of dignified neighborly ways the people show 
antagonism in religion, accompanied by cruelty to hu- 
man beings; instead of following leaders regarded with 
respect, rural society suppresses individual variation 
and minimizes exceptional excellence. Weaklings are 
made the arbiters of morality, and, contrary to the 
spirit of our civilization which exalts persons to great 
power, rustic opinion and conversation revolve around 
the doings of the subnormal. 

Religion in the country is supported by testimony of 
times and places where individuals ‘‘got religion.’’ It 
has no faith, only verified knowledge. The activities 
of country churches have lost the road of the spirit and 
vo after lawmaking, law-enforcement, and finance, and 
sometimes after voluble discussion of science or scholar- 
ship. Many ministers having no genuine spirituality 


146 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


are using the church—if they have not sunk into in- 
difference—as a vestibule to a career in teaching, or as a 
stair to personal ambition. Above all, the cooperative 
spirit is lacking which the obedience to God should 
supply, and which the life of the tiller of the soil in 
this day of organization requires. The cruel antago- 
nisms of country people center in their churches, which 
in the communities most numerously supplied with de- 
nominations do little besides opposing one another. 
They create a spirit of latent bitterness, which, un- 
softened by any love of mercy, breaks out against those 
of another creed, or race, or country. Their services 
are conducted by men untrained in literature, or in 
variety of human contacts. 

Is it any wonder that the United States is a land of 
homicides, or that in crimes of violence we Americans 
exceed all other great peoples? These crimes are most 
numerous not in the greatest cities but in those bigger 
towns in which country-born persons meet in business 
and social competition the men of other races and other 
States. To one who knows the American countryman 
of the pure American stock and has plumbed his tide of 
antagonism to its rocky bottom, or has heard his sec- 
tarian preacher in a dull, bleak meeting-house denounce 
those who live in the same town as traitors deserving 
prison, and heretics on the way to hell, it does not seem 
strange that we are cruel people. That we find it dif- 
ficult to codperate in agricultural business is, in fact, 
a result of this spirit of antagonism. But it is made 
worse by the presence in rural communities of negroes, 


RURAL SPIRITUALITY 147 


Japanese, and persons from other States, because of the 
habit, into which many Americans have fallen, of hating 
sections of the human race. 

American spirituality is lowered, also, by the domi- 
nation of religious and moral life by the weaklings. We 
do indeed receive ‘‘him that is weak,’’ but in defiance of 
Saint Paul’s warning we receive him ? ‘‘for the decision 
of scruples.”’ He too often has a place in the country 
church “as deacon or steward of the congregation. The 
system of spirituality we employ was framed in a time 
of military prowess; but we have denounced its proper 
leaders, while retaining their system. We have put the- 
corselet of Cromwell too often upon the flat chest of a 
money-lender or a reformed gambler. We love in these 
days a man who ‘‘can lead in prayer,’’ but our church 
theory is democratic and should be entrusted only to 
men who can also lead in action. So we have idealized 
the weaklings in the elders’ bench and in the pulpit. 

We have done the same thing in morality. Our argu- 
ment for abolishing the bottle from the dining-room, 
and the gambling game from the parlor has been that 
the weak brother should not be exposed to temptation. 
Small towns are dominated by that weak brother. 
The object of the apostle’s wary tolerance has become 
the arbiter of our conscience and the leader of our de- 
votions. He can indeed pray. He has exceptional 
need to do so. But he cannot lead. He can only lower 
the tone of obedience to God by his own inability . 
either to obey or to command. City churches cannot 


1Romans, XIV, 1. (Revised Version, margin.) 


148 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


survive without the leadership of superior minds. But 
country churches cannot escape the domination of the 
subnormal. 

If the writer of these complaints seems to be a severe 
critic, he at least speaks from experience and out of 
many disappointments. Sitting in church on many a 
-Sabbath morning, he has heard and seen there every- 
thing but religion. He who came to worship has been 
given politics, law-enforcement, spurious science, sensu- 
ous music, and church finance. It has seemed on many 
Sundays that the country church had missed the road 
to heaven, and was following the politician to the State 
capitol, the policeman to the jail, the teacher to the high- 
school laboratory, and the banker to his safe. None of 
these bring the weary mind to trust in God. Too often 
the minister of a village or town church, having no deep, 
abiding spirituality, uses the church as a means of liveli- 
hood until he ean ‘‘get something better.’? Sometimes 
he is in despair and tries to hide it behind tricks and 
words or loud volubilities about the departed saloon or 
safe assaults upon the vices of distant cities. 

What is spirituality? It is the quality one ob- 
serves in the conduct of those who obey God, rather than 
those who seek personal gain or are governed by things. 
It has specific forms, as love of truth, of beauty, of 
justice; such as mercy, humility; and opposite, such as 
greed, falsehood, cowardice, irreverence. For nineteen 
centuries it has been best described as likeness to Jesus 
of Nazareth. In country places spirituality betokens a 
power such as Robert Frost has, and Wordsworth had, 
of interpreting the unseen Creator by means of his work. 


RURAL SPIRITUALITY 149 


So our Lord understood His Father through the beauty 
of the lily and the security of the sparrow. (Who has 
heard in a country church in the United States a ser- 
mon on farming as imitation of the Creator? Where do 
country pastors interpret biology as the science of 
creative life, or evolution as the name for a body of 
knowledge useful to breeders of cattle? Instead, the 
farmer’s church resounds with arguments about the 
meaning of words translated from a tongue no longer 
spoken, and with denunciation of those who differ from 
the preacher. And that sort of preacher is a man well 
meaning enough, but too often one of mediocre attain- 
ments, whose advice no farmer would ask on any ques- 
tion of importance. 

There is generally in the rural community a close 
relation between the spirit of the church and the dis- 
position of the community. It is not direct. The in- 
fluence of the church upon political and civic life is not 
always evident, though the disposition of Protestant 
ministers to take active part in political matters is at 
present very pronounced. The real correlation is too 
subtle to be analyzed. But in communities in which a 
devout minister resides with his family, who knows how 
to minister to his people’s spiritual cravings and to do 
his duty as a citizen, there are usually a clean political 
life, sound economic processes, and a comfortable social 
equipment. On the other hand, the churches in some 
rural communities seem to be arrested in their Christian 
growth. Nothing good for the community comes of 
their zeal beyond the enrolment of confessing members, 
the organization of Bible classes and women’s missionary 


150 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


societies, and the support of a series of short-term 
pastors. 

What, then, promotes spirituality among farmers? 
There are several secondary factors, each of which is 
essential, and all are effective in producing reverence 
and obedience of the spirit. Beauty of color and line, 
sweet sounds, even good food and pleasant odors, con- 
tribute. But the primary factor—which seldom acts 
alone—is found in the life and conduct of persons who 
are evidently God-compelled. One or more persons de- 
voted to God, whether preacher or layman, man or 
woman, must reside in any community and have access 
to its common public life, if there is to be any high re- 
gard for truth, justice, or peace among men. Spiritu- 
ality seems to be composed of obedient imitations of 
those who obey God, and the inspiring leaders must be 
present in the community long enough for their integrity 
and sincerity to be disclosed not to reason alone but to 
instinctive imitation in the formation of habits and the 
subsequent projection of ideals. Preaching is not 
enough, nor the occasional visit of a great and good 
man. There must be living contact with living men in 
seasons of sorrow and deep joy, which are infrequent; 
until faith has been rooted in the lives of the youth, and 
until these have grown to maturity, able to pass on the 
contagion to others in their days of sorrow or of joy. 

This question of rural spirituality is of all the ques- 
tions that center in the farmer’s church the most im- 
portant. It concerns the whole community, and as the 
farm is the nation’s greatest industry, it is big with 
national import. The solution of itis simple. Problems 


RURAL SPIRITUALITY 151 


of organization do not approach it nearer than the 
threshold. Programs of activity of the church are sub- 
sequent to its solution. They are like the farming of 
a losing crop: unless the church is religious, it is a loss 
to all concerned. And we are all concerned in the suc- 
cess of the farmer’s church. The solution of the problem 
of rural spirituality les in sending to country com- 
munities resident pastors with their families—men and 
women who believe in God, and have the gift of im- 
parting a constructive faith, through a period of years, 
to the youth; and to those whose hearts are opened by 
joy, or sorrow, or fear, the mystery and the comfort 
of God. There are other sources of rural spirituality, 
but they are not subject to our control. Secondary 
causes which we control are also worthy of discussion 
in this book. But in all solutions there is present the 
God-obedient man who as a resident shepherd of souls 
has given his life to the community for, as a rule, about 
seven years. , 

The spirituality of a farmer would seem to consist 
in regarding his life and work as a trust. For the 
materials used by a farmer are necessities of life. He 
has a monopoly of the land he tills, if he 1s an owner. 
He produces the food and the raw materials of cloth- 
ing. All men are dependent upon him. His spiritual 
response should take the form of a sense of obligation 
to produce abundance, and to produce goods of the best 
quality. 

There are farmers who produce for the joy of creation 
—not forgetful, indeed, of the profit they hope to re- 
ceive. Some of them are men of sufficient means to 


152 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


free themselves, if they so desire, from the care of the 
farm, but they labor for the creation of goods because 
the creative materials are theirs. Rich soil, meadows 
for cattle to graze in, fertilizers, and the magic of leg- 
umes with which wonders can be wrought that were not 
known to their fathers—all these move them with a deep 
fascination. The Master praised husbandmen who man- 
aged well, as if He understood their feelings. 

Farmers used to strive for quantity production alone. 
in the past century agriculture has attained proficiency 
in the production of finer strains of cattle and superior 
grades of grain and cotton. The pride of the farmer 
in producing these is often alloyed with a desire for 
profit, because of the high prices paid and the exceptional 
gains in the commercial process attending these pro- 
ductive victories. But the joy of creation is there; in- 
deed, that joy of quality production is measured econom- 
ically by higher prices. For other producers show 
that they share the admiration for high creation. 

As we have seen, the revival of Denmark in the past 
sixty years has been a dual movement, religious and 
industrial. While the Danes were building creameries 
they were rebuilding their churches. Who shall say 
that they are not a spiritual people, who have been the 
first European nation to consider total disarmament? 

There should be in the United States a religious re- 
vival in which the classes of the population now dissatis- 
fied with the churches we have, shall lead. They are 
the laborers, the farmers, and the intellectuals. Among 
the last-named class are the scientific workers. They 


RURAL SPIRITUALITY 153 


are closely related; for the scientific workers are the 
brains of power-machinery and of specialized agricul- 
ture. They all proceed by methods of objective think- 
ing, by measurement and record of phenomena, by 
organized discussion and utilitarian use of the bodies of 
knowledge. There will some day arise among us a 
prophet who shall know how to tell new truths about 
God, truths learned by those who study phenomena. 
Our religious experience has been stated for us by 
prophets trained in the humanities. Such were Paul 
and Augustine and Luther and Wesley. When a man 
of imagination arises, who has been trained in use of 
the microscope and the statistical graph, whose soul 
cries out for God, we shall have a new spirituality of the 
farm. It may be that the revival of the farmer’s church 
awaits the coming of that prophet. 

American religion is also indebted to science, because 
science protects us against superstition. The unknown 
realities affect us whether we consider them or not; and 
we respond to them emotionally. The commonest re- 
sponse to the realities of the world unknown to our 
senses is superstition, which may be defined as un- 
reasonable human behavior about death, marriage, hus- 
bandry, sin, and other mysterious experiences. Men of 
all races have their tabus, fetishes, charms, and incanta- 
tions, of which they can give no rational explanation. 
Their lives are ruled for the larger part by these irra- 
tional responses to obligation that custom has sanctified 
and fears enforce. Let no one think our own land, be- 
cause its people are profusely educated, is free of 


154 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


superstitions. A recent book? details at length the 
irrational practices which Americans are given to; and 
every one knows the list is a long one. It is not the 
province of education alone to abate superstition, but, 
in a more intimate way, that of religion. There is not 
sufficient intelligence for the task, because critical in- 
telligence is given to few minds to exercise. 

Religion is a medium for the application of intelligence 
to emotion, and for the organized restraint of fears, 
by reason. There are, indeed, religions that are com- 
pacted superstitions, to which no critical intelligence has 
ever been applied for the discernment and denunciation 
of misbeliefs. But the Jewish-Christian religion has 
been a progressive application of the critical mind 
through more than two thousand years to the irrational 
practices of religious people. Probably if there were 
no Christianity, and certainly if there were no Prot- 
estant churches, there would be more religious exercises: 
more sighing and groaning, more shouting and more 
kneeling would be ours if it were not for Isaiah, and 
Augustine, and Luther, and Wesley. For these churches 
of ours, by their creeds and their ordering of life, re- 
duce religion to staid demeanor and give a liturgy to 
those whom fears would otherwise make frantic. 

The fact that Americans and Western Europeans are 
calm in the presence of death and unresentful in the face 
of transgression, is a consequence of the restraint put 
upon emotion by reason. For the unknown awakens the 
passions. 


2“ American Folk Lore,” C. E. Brown. University of Wisconsin 
Press. 1922. 


RURAL SPIRITUALITY 155 


American religious history * exhibits the arousal of 
religious feeling. The early settlers and the remote 
country-dwellers of our day exhibit the turning of lonely 
men and women to God, when they have no preacher to 
guide them, with sighing and groaning like the agonies 
of the heathen. Wherever there is no responsible 
church, there is likely to be one invented; and for the 
time this lasts it is more religious, so far as emotional 
exercises go, than the conventional churches. It seems 
as if the springs of religion are in the earth. Smitten 
with the rod of man’s lonely husbandry, they pour 
forth. Christianity is the engineering science which 
controls the plan of religion in the world and directs it 
into useful channels. 


3“The Great Revival in the West,’ Catherine C. Cleveland. 
University of Chicago Press. 1916. 


CHAPTER XII 


THE DIFFERENCE 


HERE is something thrilling about a commu- 
nity in which the Christian religion is in 


evidence. There is a feeling of disgust and 
contempt among people who see the forms of religion 
but not a Christian spirit. The difference between 
communities that have spirituality and those which have 
religion without it, is not easy to define; but it registers 
in positive satisfaction or revolt. I dare say that this 
difference is sufficient to account in many instances for 
the departure of persons from a country community, or 
the enjoyment of a community by those who remain 
there. Yet it is not easy to decide what is the determin- 
ing factor. One is tempted to fix upon a physical differ- 
ence and assign it as the cause ofthe joy of living known 
in one place, and the distaste for the community ex- 
pressed in the other. 

Church people are likely to give, as a cause of religious 
happiness, the number of members their church has, the 
faithfulness of a minister through a long pastorate, or 
the beauty of their Gothic architecture and church servy- 
ice. I set these causes in a high place, but they do not 
belong in my present concern; they are, at the best, 


only means to an end. The difference between a com- 
156 


THE DIFFERENCE 157 


munity that enjoys religion and one that does not, is dis- 
covered in a state of feeling and of character. Physical 
arrangements, such as the locating of a resident pastor 
for a long period of years, have much to do with the 
permanence of these feelings and with other advantages, 
of one place over another, but sometimes these very ar- 
rangements are found where the spirit and the will 
are absent. 

I do not think, either, that the difference we feel in 
country communities is a declared willingness, on the 
part of some people, to obey Jesus Christ and, on the 
part of others, inattention to the imitation of Christ. 
It is not essentially a mystical experience, for few among 
men are mystics. This difference in country com- 
munities is shared by every one. It lays hold of their 
common speech, it commands the grateful assent of the 
poor and the profane, it brings a softer expression to 
_ the faces of arrogant, worldly people, and it enters by 
the unguarded door of social imitation into the conduct 
of every one in the community. 

So far as I can discover, this difference between com- 
munities is not dependent upon what we Americans eall 
a revival. During times of protracted meetings there 
is a feeling of spiritual alarm and subsequent spiritual 
peace, which many share; those who look on admire and 
approve the change from a sense of sin to a sense of 
Security, on the part of the persons converted; but the 
revival does not give directly a sense of worth and of 
faith to the community and all its people. Many re- 
vivals are carried on at such high tension that they are 
succeeded by disgust and disillusionment; the let-down 


158 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


that follows is so cruel that the excitement is remembered 
with shame, and religion has thereafter to overcome a 
reluctance. Not so the community that has experienced 
the difference between a religion of joy and no religion 
at all. 

I know a town in an Eastern State that has passed 
from one condition to the other; for fifty years it has 
been losing its population to the near-by manufacturing 
cities; its own people follow the industry of farming 
alone; it has a limited number of families with the tra- 
dition of scholarship, reading, and high moral convie- 
tion. The whole population possesses a tradition of 
personal independence, and almost every one is an owner 
of land. For twenty years the one church in the town— 
two others having closed their doors at the beginning of 
the population decrease—had a succession of pastors, 
either indifferent to the community or negligent of the 
high value of Christianity; that is, they made no im- 
pression upon the town in respect to sincerity, self- 
restraint, or love of their neighbors. They lived to 
themselves: their selfishness was sometimes gross and 
always sterile of any good to their people. Some of 
these men were preachers of superior ability, but that 
made no difference. 

Then came a young pastor who seemed like the others, 
except in a sturdy candor and devotion to the work of 
his chureh, the care of his family, and the simple 
prosaic relations of life into which his lot had fallen. 
He had to work with his hands to supplement his small 
salary, and he did everything with a satisfactory hearti- 
ness which left an impression quite impossible to 


THE DIFFERENCE 159 


describe, but always favorable. For five years he held 
his ground, but professed no program. He was in favor 
in the community, as was his wife also; full of health and 
energy, giving happiness and receiving it, making 
no great professions, attacking no evils except when 
they came across his path, and then never avoiding 
them ; living as a good human being, and dignifying the 
ministry of Christ with something of manly integrity 
that always fitted the popular conception of a Chris- 
tian. At the end of seven years he was a better 
preacher; he had, little by little, pervaded the whole 
town without ever planning to do so. He not only was 
acquainted with every one, but had attracted the full 
knowledge and friendship of those about him by the 
very fact that he had worked with his hands in the fields 
of many of them, and had sat in their gatherings always 
as an equal. 

Meantime, some changes in the community itself con- 
tributed to the rebirth of this dead town. A crop of 
high-school children grew up, and a daily bus was em- 
ployed to carry them six miles every day to high school. 
Public events in the way of play festivals, library days, 
well-chaperoned dances, and the building of short 
stretches of new road, gave outlet to a spirit of hope. 
Two young men who had experience of the larger world 
came to middle life. One was a resident, a graduate of 
Yale, the other, a generous, public-spirited business man 
of means.~ After the World War the town entered upon 
two experiences that revealed a new spirit. 

Some one proposed that a memorial be set up for 
soldiers. After some discussion a boulder was selected, 


160 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


and it was agreed by the group of farmers that gather 
regularly in the one store of this town, to move this 
boulder two miles and set it up at the tiny triangle 
where the roads meet ‘‘at the center.’’ Preparation 
for this event consumed months of that slow discussion 
by which volunteers approach a common task; but 
finally the men of the town gathered round the boulder 
lying in the bed in which the glacier had deposited it 
millions of years before. Pick and shovel disclosed the 
fact that it was bigger and more difficult to move than 
they had expected. But greater difficulties only called 
forth greater forces, and there ensued one of those 
strange attacks of the human mind upon inert matter 
which are so fascinating to see. Every man in town was 
called out by the struggle. The volunteers jostled one 
another, crowbar in hand. Leaders were easily found 
and readily obeyed, for it soon was evident who among 
them had the gift of command. 

After a long effort the boulder was moved a little 
toward the road, and gradually it was edged along by 
that skill that countrymen in the older States possess, 
until it was careened upon an underslung wagon—which 
it promptly broke down. 

New tackle was devised, new gear and new energies 
offered. The whole town was thrilled over the under- 
taking. It was more fascinating than a man-hunt. The 
energies that are hurled in some dull communities into 
scandal, the violence that occasionally breaks out in an 
American lynching were concentrated upon that huge 
reluctant mass of granite. Inch by inch, and foot by 
foot at first, under the pull of three tractors, the great 


THE DIFFERENCE 161 


stone moved along the road. A bridge over which it 
was to pass had to be sustained with fresh supports 
below. A little hill beyond the brook was a new ob- 
stacle, and the struggle to mount it seemed hopeless. 

But every obstacle was overcome, and after a week 
of such excitement as the town had not known even in 
its four war-times, the boulder was deposited in its 
significant seat, which it fitted as if the crossing of the 
roads had been planned for its reception. The subse- 
quent public ceremony—when the bronze tablet upon 
it was unveiled in the presence of the Governor of the 
State—was only a climax. The great experience had 
been the united action of the whole town and the public 
service that demonstrated the worth of the community. 
Something had happened to disclose to the men in the 
town that they had power and will. They could do 
things. It was dear to their thrifty hearts that with an 
expenditure of less than one hundred dollars they had 
a finer memorial than a near-by opulent village had se- 
cured at the cost of thousands. One man, who had been 
considering a departure from the town, said, ‘‘How 
could I leave when I saw what this town could do?’’ 
The whole experience had seemed to purify the air and 
sweeten the atmosphere of the place. Life had a value 
it had never possessed before. The people of the town 
had united in an experience unselfish and of public 
benefit. Even those who contributed nothing—as 
some surly spirits always begrudge their parts—had 
been present on certain days to have their picture 
taken by the photographer; so that every one was sat- 
isfied. 


162 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


Not long afterward the same town went through a 
spiritual crisis. This came suddenly and nothing lke it 
had ever occurred before. It stirred the conscience and 
the feelings of every one, and required a discussion for 
which there was no precedent. The storekeeper in the 
town was an aged man with a rare gift for business, 
accuracy, fine judgment, and an admirable interest in 
the community and in every member of it. He had 
maintained for fifty years an old-fashioned country 
store of the sort one reads about, where through winter 
days and on all the nights of the year men congregated 
to talk and argue. He had recently surrendered to 
the one politician of the town the office of town treasurer, 
which he had held for forty-six years. In connection 
with the transfer of ancient accounts his New England 
conscience raised a question as to a certain small fund, 
long since forgotten by every one but himself. His 
successor encouraged him to believe that he was an 
unintentional defaulter and he paid over a substantial 
amount to make good the default. Then his accurate 
mind and trained sense of justice raised doubts, hesita- 
tions, which were too much for his enfeebled powers. 
He fell into melancholy amounting almost to a harmless 
insanity. 

As soon as these things became known to the town, 
they created intense excitement. There were some who 
at once accepted the accusation against the old man and 
believed that, like many another trusted public servant, 
he had defaulted. A very few assumed a cynical tone 
and declared that they' would see him leave the town 
penniless, as he had come fifty years before. But 


THE DIFFERENCE 163 


most of the citizens were reluctant to believe that this 
trusted and honest man, whose integrity they knew, 
could be to blame. A meeting of the whole town was 
held, and after discussion this meeting ordered the re- 
turn of the money paid over. Promptly the new town 
treasurer accused his predecessor of further defalcation, 
and named an amount so large as to astonish every voter 
and tax-payer. Subsequent town meetings were or- 
dered. A public accountant supported the accusation 
against the venerable merchant, and it seemed that the 
tax-payers of the community must rise to demand full 
payment. | 

Then a strange thing happened. There were four 
men in the town who had refused at every turn to be- 
lieve the accusation true. As the meetings approached 
at which the question would be settled, they studied the 
accounts of the town for fifty years back and discov- 
ered that the town bonds of fifty years before, on which 
the default was said to have occurred, had been issued 
in duplicate; and at once light appeared upon the dark 
problem. MHurried consultations with the most re- 
sponsible accountants of the State followed, a complete 
reversal of the verdict was secured, and when the town 
meeting assembled the second accusation against the old 
man was cleared up. 

But now remained this question: Should the town 
return to a well-to-do citizen an amount that had been 
exacted from him when he seemed to himself to have 
been in default? The meeting, the largest ever held 
in the history of the town, was one of tremendous feel- 
ing. Every citizen—even persons who seldom attended 


164 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


any public gathering—was there. No play festival, or 
church anniversary, not even the setting up of the 
Soldiers’ Memorial before the town hall had been at- 
tended by more of the citizens. There was no discus- 
sion. Only one question was raised: ‘‘ Will the town 
have to be taxed to repay this money? Will the 
farmers have to raise more money to correct the fault 
into which a politician has led them?’’ The answer was 
in the affirmative. No further question was raised, but 
a vote was called for and with almost unanimous voice 
this community of poor farmers voted to return to its 
most substantial citizen money which their elected offi- 
cer had exacted from him and paid into the treasury of 
the State. 

After the meeting, scenes of elation and relief took 
place on every side. No religious revival was ever fol- 
lowed by more genuine expressions of pity and joy, than 
this revival in which a town had repented of its error. 
To see men who seldom wear any garb but overalls, their 
faces lighted with happiness, was a strange experience. 
One elderly farmer, who had come to the end of a life- 
long struggle to get a farm of his own, testified with 
tears to the fact that he too had at one time thought the 
old man guilty of default: and then he recited how when 
he was in the beginning of his struggle to pay for his 
farm, the old storekeeper had advanced him the money 
to buy a needed pair of mules, and had let him pay the 
loan at his own convenience without interest. 

Next morning the old storekeeper, who had not left 
his house for weeks, was seen again in the store for a 
few hours, whistling as he worked over his books. Men 


THE DIFFERENCE 165 


who passed along the road spread the news that he had 
recovered his mind, and happiness ruled for a short 
time. Alas for the weakness of old age! The cloud 
soon descended upon his mind, and in a few days he 
died. But the spirit that had restored him to his place 
of csteem remained. The whole town had gone through 
an experience of pity, mercy, and justice, and had nar- 
rowly escaped a shameful scandal, being saved by the 
resolute faith of a few. I am confident that this could 
not have happened if the town had not been prepared 
by a few honest, sincere men and women, who in the 
years immediately preceding these events had attended 
to public concerns and had thought about the common 
welfare. 

Contrast this situation with the religious and moral 
condition in so many country towns and villages 
throughout the United States. They often have not 
only one church but several. Ministers reside in them 
and preach regularly. Their religious organization is 
satisfactory to the denominations which we know in 
America. They have revivals. They receive members. 
They raise funds. They maintain Sunday-schools. The 
usual religious machinery is in motion. In some of 
these towns the membership in the churches is of the 
average of the country. But the difference between 
them and the place in which life is worth while is im- 
measurable. I cannot give details that will describe 
it. But the citizens of these towns speak and think 
with disgust and distaste of the places in which they 
live. 

For instance, I was told recently, by a distinguished 


166 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


scholar, of his native village in the central West, to 
which he returns at times as a visitor. The population 
is about twenty-five hundred. The country around 
adds as many more to the natural community. There 
are in the village five churches, one of which has a 
membership of more than a thousand. Seventy-five 
per cent. of the people of the community are enumerated 
in church membership, but a spirit of contention is 
everywhere. Competition and mutual criticism are 
regularly employed in religious work. Small scandals 
are welcomed and not suppressed at the source, as they 
should be. And although the community is made up 
of American stock, with no negroes or foreigners to dis- 
turb its serenity, there is present in it an organized 
hatred of the foreigner. The minister of the biggest 
church in the community is a distinguished orator, who 
uses his gifts to deliver in the village and in near-by 
towns brilliant addresses denouncing Roman Catholics 
and cultivating a hatred for the Jews. Neither Cath- 
olics nor Jews disturb the population to which he speaks, 
but he gives the narrow spirits of his audiences an 
object on which to expend their malice. He cultivates 
a religion of hatred. 

The result is that this village is distasteful to its own 
people. The life there has no worth for those who must 
live it. A general pessimism prevails. Men desire to 
move away as soon as they can. A kind of sneering 
disbelief in any good thing of a local sort is the usual 
undertone of talk. It seemed to my informant that 
religion had departed from this place at the very time 
at which the usual provision for religion was completed. 


THE DIFFERENCE 167 


Churches are there, but no spirituality. Worship and 
Evangelism, Sunday-school teaching and the work of 
church societies are all actively pursued. But the re- 
sult attains in the community none of the ends of the 
Christian religion. There are none of the satisfactions 
of Christian experience such as all in the community 
can enjoy. 

This difference between communities seems to show 
that something is needed in this country beyond that 
which the denominations provide. There is in this fact 
‘no discredit to the denominations, for their provision 
is of a machinery proper to religious life: we cannot 
get on without it. But a new spirit is needed. New 
consecrations and new gifts are required if we are to 
have a religion in the United States that will make life 
in small communities worth while. The little towns 
and the open country do not have the external rewards 
of life. They can and must test, by sincerity, the worth 
of what they have, much more than the big cities do. 
The life in the cities, which is for many a superficial 
life, is enriched by the presence of many excitements 
and the possibility of consuming a variety of goods to 
the end of enjoyment. City people have the money 
and they spend it; they have works of art; they have 
music, dramatic entertainment, brilliant lights, and con- 
siderable excitement. ; 

It is quite possible for a man to live in a city and 
forget that life is without real satisfaction. It is im- 
possible in a small town. There must be true Christi- 
anity in a little place where moving pictures are not | 
changed more than once a week, and a good theater is 


168 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


never opened, where the buildings are commonplace 
and the architecture is prosaic and tawdry; where to 
attain neatness and order means a struggle. Men can- 
not say that life is worth while there unless there is a 
spiritual worth in life itself. The small towns and the 
open country, therefore, are the real proving ground 
of religion. 

The question still remains with which I began: 
What is the cause and what are the sources of this 
spiritual condition? I do not know the whole answer, 
for I believe that the sources are many. Anything that 
gives worth to life, will help—architectural distinction, 
beauty of scene, color, graceful lines. Music confers 
worth on life because it expresses wonder and mystery 
in harmonious terms. Old families confer worth on 
life because they are significant at least of stability 
through many years and many changes. Learning con- 
fers worth because it provides a wide-reaching assur- 
ance of knowledge that is not of the moment. Educa- 
tion provides worth because it engages a limited 
number of persons in far-reaching thoughts and secures 
them in habits of mind and soul that are shared by a 
easte of learned men throughout the world. It gives 
them access to sources of imperishable knowledge. It 
even corrects their speech and demeanor. 

But the real source of spirituality must be in personal 
character. There must be in a community that has a 
conviction of its own worth, some persons who are sin- 
cere and fearless, who sacrifice for unseen realities. It 
is not enough to have just one person, even if he be the 
pastor and the prophet. He must have a group of minds 


THE DIFFERENCE 169 


and souls with which he can interact in continuing 
experience through months and years of sincerity and 
of faith. If this condition is met, and if their acts of 
daring and faith are such as to appeal to the minds of 
all, the community has worth and joy. If the men of 
faith are aristocrats, bookish or socially superior, living 
apart, the condition is not met. In this day of prole- 
tarian rule the small group of leaders must send out 
influencer on the same sound waves as the people of the 
community react to, if there is to be a spirit of justice 
and faith and joy. 

I see only one more essential characteristic of a 
spiritual-minded community and that is that it be 
international in its interests—which is a big word for a 
simple thing. If the community interests partake of 
those things that engage many men throughout the 
world and even across the seas, then the community will 
be tolerant, merciful, and just. It seems to me that the 
best principle according to which the selection of 
community interests could be made is that those concerns 
of a community shall be advanced that are harmonious 
with the concerns of other races and their countries. 
Thus the local organization and the local feeling will be 
broadly human and all men can better share therein. 


CHAPTER XIII 


MORAL VALUES 


"T br Opinions of country people are austere and 
stern. Farmers invariably have a code of 
morality in reference to common events. They 

constantly discuss right and wrong. Their ethical 

standards are most intense in their expression through 
the country church. Without regard to the correctness - 
and permanent value of farmers’ moral opinions, it is 
worth while to consider the causes that make the farmer 

a moralist. 

The first cause is in the experience of isolation which. 
marks all the life of country people. So deep is this 
strain in our moral complexion that the second genera- 
tion of people in cities show it in a kind of independence 
and aloofness which their grandfathers learned while 
following, the plow and their grandmothers when they 
were throwing the shuttle through the loom in the room 
off the old farm kitchen. 

There are two reasons why men live on the isolated 
farms of the United States; one is industrial: the other 
is psychological. The industrial reason is the necessity 
which keeps the farmer near to his domestic animals and 
plants. Family farm organization is probably the most 
efficient agrarian organization in the world. At least 
it is the latest form and has supplanted the manor in 

170 


MORAL VALUES Lit 


western Europe, the plantation in the South, and the 
bonanza farm in the West. So that there is a necessity 
upon the farmer to live alone. Naturally he idealizes a 
life of independence. He projects his own way of 
living as a good way and would impose it upon all 
society. He compares others with himself. Conse- 
quently we have many churches in the United States 
which make a religious doctrine of independence. Many 
are Congregational in government which do not eall 
themselves by that name. They idealize the life made 
necessary by the industry of tilling the soil. 

It may be, also, that many live in the country who like 
to be alone. This is the psychological reason why men 
live on isolated farms. Farm communities give evi- 
dence in their public meetings and common enterprises 
of the aloofness of mind and independence of action 
which a large fraction of the residents of the farms 
prefer to practise. Nearly one half of the people in 
some communities and more than one fourth of the 
farmers in most communities belong to nothing except 
the family. Their innate preference for minding their 
own business should be studied and understood if one 
is to appreciate in its real meaning the American 
‘eountry church; for some of these lonely souls get 
religion and, when they do, they make it like unto them- 
selves. This is their right: and persons who live in 
cities, where there is congestion, should not idealize 
the crowded life as the only way of serving God. 
Whether they prefer to be alone or not, many country 
people put a high estimate upon independence and 
would gladly impose it upon others. 


172 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


The morality of the country is an independent 
morality. Men are expected to take care of themselves. 
In business matters one is shocked to see the apparent 
indifference of one man to his neighbor’s economic 
misfortunes. This hardness of heart has something 
admirable about it. Under different circumstances the 
man who appears so selfish would sacrifice the best he 
has for his neighbor, but he is accustomed to think of 
himself as economically responsible for his own house 
and his own kindred; contrariwise, free of the care of his 
neighbor’s estate. 

Country people contribute to our national code of 
ethics the finest practice of neighborly service. For 
such as they, I suppose, was written that simple and 
supreme law, ‘‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’’ 
Our Lord enlarged it and insisted upon its operation in a 
mobilized population of travelers and merchants, but 
probably it was announced at the beginning as a law 
for a rural people. They alone know how to obey it. 
Independent and aloof as they are, farmers will do for 
a neighbor what city men will not do for the ‘man 
nearest at hand. In the country it matters not who the 
next-door neighbor is: a fine sense of responsibility 
makes the farmer loan to him and give to him much of 
what he has. To a city man who lives for a part of the 
year in a country community, this ministration on which 
no price is put has a character almost angelic. He is 
used to a world where everything has its price, but 
among his rural neighbors services are free. They help 
him when his ear is in a hole, they nurse him when he is 
sick, they contribute without ostentation if he is poor, » 


MORAL VALUES 173 


even to the extent of setting him on his feet again; and 
they take no credit; for the farmers’ code is law and to 
obey it brings no merit, only the joy of well-doing. 

The church in the country was originally a neighbor- 
hood society. It was no bigger than the company of 
farmers who knew one another well. Its minister cost 
little, and it hired no other services than preaching. 
Churches of this sort are now out of date, but the code 
of neighborly service without price is not discarded in 
this day of scientific farming. The church itself should 
be, and generally is, a court of ethics in the enforcement 
of neighborly conduct. Not a few country churches 
have been careful to preserve the habit of organizing the 
community for the help of a stricken neighbor. They 
keep as many services as possible in a voluntary class 
and train their members in doing things together for the 
common interest. 

In all this one finds no explanation, however, of the — 
moral dominance which farmers claim. Two organized 
expressions of moral control have grown up in rural 
America that require to be explained by something be- 
sides the neighborly spirit. Prohibition was originally 
a farmer’s law. The Ku Klux Klan has developed its 
greatest force in agricultural sections of the country. 
Both of these profess to lay a rule upon other persons. 
Prohibition is the legal control imposed by total 
abstainers upon others in the community who may 
desire to purchase and use alcoholic liquor. The mem- 
bers of the hooded order very generally profess to 
regulate the morals of the community, by threats and if 
necessary by violence. How can we explain these two 


174 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


expressions of the rural mind? How can we under- 
stand the close relation of both of them to the country 
ehurch? For in both of these movements ministers and 
congregations of farmers have taken an active part, of 
which they are far from ashamed. 

It seems to me that the interest of country people in 
private conduct is rooted in something deeper than the 
Puritan tradition. It is commonly explained as an ex- 
pression of Puritanism, but other rural peoples* which 
are not Puritanical have the same inclination to 
domineer over the conduct of individuals. In the 
United States the pressure of public opinion upon the 
conduct of the individual is overwhelming. A young 
teacher in a school in the rural South committed an 
indiscretion in a casual afternoon’s enjoyment. The 
young man who was in her company was equally to 
blame, and as a matter of fact the blunder of which 
the two young persons were guilty was little more 
than an accident. But the condemnation of the commu- 
nity, after a swift and hurried discussion, fell like a 
sudden storm upon the girl and she was forced to leave 
the place. One might give numberless instances of this 
eruelty with which rural communities force their 
collective opinion upon their members. Sinclair Lewis 
wrote a tragic chapter in ‘‘ Main Street’’ to express this 

habit of country people. 
~The writer believes that the source of this intolerant 
state of mind, which busies itself in correcting the 
supposed misconduct of neighbors, lies in the effort of 
country people to form a social organization, and to 


1“Treland in the New Century,” Sir Horace Plunkett. Dutton. 


MORAL VALUES 175 


maintain it, that will compel moral conduct and sustain 
the institutions of life. In larger communities a 
greater tolerance is possible because society is obviously 
complete there and its power is adequately represented. 
Urban society has policemen and judges. Indeed, every 
doorkeeper is a policeman and the conductor of every 
publie vehicle a magistrate in little, to enforce the code 
of conduct which is necessary to the congested life of 
the city. But in the country, society is cruder and more 
clumsy. It has virtually no paid executives. The 
exercise, therefore, of the rural code is harsh and the 
blow when it falls is heavy, the judgment often unjust. 

Such habits as were connected with the saloon in 
earlier times seemed to undermine the family govern- 
ment which is the mode of social organization proper 
to agriculture. Farmers will do anything to maintain © 
the ordinary way of life on which their existence 
‘depends. Therefore they see red when they are told 
that a man is drunk and abuses his wife or is cruel to his 
children. They cling to domestic virtues as a sailor in 
a fishing-boat on the wide sea clings to his steering-gear. 
Family integrity is a life-and-death matter to the tillers 
of the soil. As the family farm predominates in the 
country, they instinctively rise to its defense, because 
without it there could be no life for them, no industry, 
and no dignity or reward. Therefore the farmer has a 
radical antagonism to alcoholic indulgence. His church 
expresses this antagonism. The destruction of ‘‘the 
liquor business’’ was decreed by country churches thirty 
years ago. 

The same explanation must suffice for the extremes to 


176 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


which the hooded orders have gone, in recent years, in 
the Southwest and middle West. The story of the 
sudden growth of the Klan has been written, but not the 
record of its activities, and one might err in either 
direction if he attempted to state how general have been 
the beatings and the punishments administered to 
individuals for supposed moral wrong-doing. There 
ean be no doubt, however, that the members of these 
secret orders have punished many men deserving of 
punishment, for intemperance, for the illegal sale of 
liquor, and for domestic offenses.” 

Two other explanations may be added. These excesses 
are of the post-war period. Men who have been over- 
whelmed in the agony of a bloody conflict are prone to 
excesses. Besides this, the government of rural com- 
munities is very lax. Many who live in the country 
know but little in their daily life of the operation of any 
government. Once a year they pay their taxes because 
they have to, and periodically they vote if it is not too 
inconvenient, but they live a life removed from official 
control. This life they prefer, but as they become 
possessed with the desire to control their neighbors for 
the supposed good of family life and of the community, 
they never turn to local officers of local government 
for the remedy. Having little experience of govern- 
ment, they turn to the churches, which are for them 
the natural exponents of society. They support ministers 
in violent expressions and prefer those who denounce 
and condemn without mercy. 


2“The Challenge of the Klan,” Stanley Frost. Bobbs-Merrill. 
1923. 


MORAL VALUES 177 


Only recently have Americans realized the corruption 
and inefficiency of local government. We have been 
engaged for more than a generation in a hurried reform 
of city government. Appalled at the growth of cities 
and stirred by the abuses which are evident on so large a 
scale in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, we have 
turned our moral attention to those great centers, for- 
getting that in the town and the country are officials 
on whom public opinion expends little of its notice. 
County government in particular, which prevails 
throughout all the country except New England, as an 
area of administration, is lax and indifferent.* The 
county official seeks to serve out his term with as little 
public notice as possible. He wants his salary and his 
small dignity, and hopes to escape severe exertion or 
criticism. He generally succeeds. 

In many of the States county officials, though vaguely 
subject to the control of the governor, are really 
independent of him. Their conduct has no regular or 
even practicable supervision. They can do as they 
please. To them, unfortunately, comes the great body 
of misdemeanors and crimes, for trial and adjustment. 
In the majority of the acts of the county government 
that are brought to public attention, it performs its 
duty well. Indeed, the fiscal routine of county 
administration is satisfactorily carried out. But for 
the purpose of expressing the moral sentiment of the 
families engaged in the agricultural industry, and the 

3See “Our Neglected Counties,” and other publications of 


“American City”; also “County Administration,” C. C. Maxey. 
Macmillan. 1919. 


178 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


prevalent convictions as to individual conduct, family 
integrity, the protection of women, the sheltering of 
children, county government is impotent so far as the 
officers who should function are concerned. It is: too 
often corrupt. Here is a reason for the development of 
these great intolerant and passionate moral movements 
which have astonished the nation and made the Amer- 
ican people peculiar in the world. 

If the prohibition reform had contented itself with 
local option and so had established the control of 
individuals and of families by means of courts and 
executive officers in the locality, we should have ben- 
efited as a nation in the slower moral development of our 
people. But because of the breakdown of local govern- 
ment, the impotence of county government, the corrup- 
tion and uselessness of many local officers—whose number 
is legion indeed—rural America has turned in despera- 
tion to the national government for the enforcement of a 
law to protect the family. We have the strange 
spectacle of many good men in country towns, notably 
a large number of ministers of country churches, 
supporting the violent and cruel secret organizations 
because they provide an effective local police. They 
intimidate wrong-doers; they accomplish what the 
proper officials fail to accomplish. 

How serious this evil is one cannot at the present time 
say. It may be that we are becoming so unified as a 
nation through instant communication, motor trans- 
portation, perfected railroad systems, and a swiftly 
extending network of highways, that we can act together 


MORAL VALUES 179 


as a nation on a great scale. One must not look back- 
ward only and idealize local government alone, but the 
present writer believes that the breakdown of our system 
of local self-control is a great loss to the nation. He 
does not hope for gains from an effective centralized 
government in Washington that can in any degree 
compensate for the loss of what the community should 
do for itself. 

What is the duty of the farmer’s church in this moral 
crisis? A tolerant and broad-minded minister would be 
unwelcome in most American communities. The at- 
mosphere of censure and moral domineering is so 
general and so contagious that few can resist it. It 
penetrates to any mean or weak element in the nature 
of a well-meaning and high-minded man. It is likely 
to overcome his scruples and to force him, whether he 
will or not, to become a censor and an accuser. The 
first duty of the church is to resist this intolerant 
- Spirit and to teach a respect for men of all nations. The 
social program of the congregation and the missionary 
work of the church as a whole may accomplish much in 
this regard. 

Probably the best corrective of defects and the most 
effectual means to the attainment of a larger spirit is to 
be found in the recreational organization of the church. 
If a country church has a meeting-place for all the 
people, if it maintains a forum for the discussion of large 
affairs, if it has a room for the quotation of market 
statements, if it has frequent social gatherings in which 
men may accustom themselves to one another and to a 


180 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


variety of meetings of many kinds of persons and on 
many occasions, the intolerant spirit will be dissolved 
and a sweet reasonableness will prevail. 

There is only one sure medicine for the sickness of 
American moral opinion. Public opinion rightly di- 
rected is a noble force. It is well to live in a community 
where no policeman is needed. It is far better for a 
community to govern itself than to be in fear of the 
man in uniform. Public opinion can be healed of its 
diseases by an experience of the world and of the 
interests of all mankind. Nothing else will purge it of 
intolerance and cruelty. The interests common to the 
peoples of the modern world express themselves in 
trade, in credit, in education, in health, in recreation, 
in music, in dramatic art, as well as in the missionary 
work of the churches. These are the elements that 
ought to organize the community. They are in them- 
selves a school of moral values. When a country 
community is organized, with a house of its own for the 
embodiment of these international interests and for the 
discussion of their developing programs, for the enjoy- 
ment of their processes, that community will have a 
moral code which is tolerant, wise, and effective for 
conserving what is good in family life and in personal 
character, as well as conducive to progress. 


CHAPTER XIV 


COUNTRY-CHURCH FINANCES 


ANY country churches were established in 
M religious zeal; many of those which have 

suffered and died perished under a financial 
blight. This is not to say that zeal is always good and 
finance is always evil. The fact is that a grant of 
money has been essential to the beginning of a majority 
of the churches in the country, and religious zeal has 
had its part in the destruction of some. But the period 
of the country-church decline has been a period of 
financial exploitation. The money test has been applied 
to all things. Many churches could not endure it and 
have perished before the advance of financial prosperity 
as if it were a pestilence. A minister in New York, who 
serves country churches on the border of a small city, 
says, ‘‘Most little churches in this country that have 
been closed were the sufferers at the last from a quarrel 
over finance.’’ 

There is a financial depression of the farm in 
industry, but the difficulties of the country church are 
not identified with this depression. Its lack, as 
compared with other churches, is expressed in the 
efficiency of local financiers. It needs a reconstruction 


of its buildings and a funding of national resources for 
181 


182 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


the sustaining of weak churches. The way out for the 
country church is not in an ill-paid, inefficient ministry 
or an unpaid minister who works in the fields, but in 
the enlistment of men of high faith and human sympathy 
under adequate economic support. 

Finances have a moral and spiritual character of 
their own which the present generation has reluctantly 
admitted. Money has an extraordinary mobility. It 
is an assembly of the infinitely little for the accomplish- 
ment of great things. This description fits church work. 
Vast hopes have long been cherished by people with 
small estates and petty incomes. The perfection of 
financial means in our time has suited religious people, 
for it has enabled them, of little gifts, to make huge 
budgets. This is a lesson that country people need to 
learn from men in cities. They have not acquired the 
ways of using money that city people know. They are 
therefore weak because they cannot assemble into great 
masses the wealth they have, and they do not see the 
value of small contributions in amassing large funds. 

Money touches almost everything we do. Country 
people are now the buyers of goods such as their grand- 
sires once made. So that money touches them when- 
ever they handle a tool, or button a coat, or set the 
table. It is important that the farm population learn 
to consecrate this use of wealth to a divine purpose. 
It is probable that the money gifts of many persons to 
the churches have helped them to get away from the 
former distinction between sacred and secular. It may 
seem that in their thinking about men and material they 


COUNTRY-CHURCH FINANCES 183 


have merely erased the false line between the holy and 
the common. 

There are in the country many congregations which 
still refuse to have anything to do with money. Many 
people condemn the paid preacher; they logically follow 
through to the condemnation of expensive church equip- 
ment and costly programs. One’s mind would gladly 
follow them if it were not that the churches they or- 
ganize are emotional and narrow in their outlook and 
generally short-lived. But American experience and 
the understanding we have of spiritual life lead us to 
believe that the church in the country as well as in the 
city must address itself to the consecration of its 
financial resources to the Lord. 

First of all the farmer’s church needs a thorough 
safeguarding of the gifts of the people. Every church 
should have a secular board, if its monies are not 
handled by the minister under a denominational rule. 
In any case, the contributions of farmers should be 
administered for the attainment of confidence and 
efficiency. 

All money should be handled by two persons, not by 
one alone. Every penny should be accounted for under 
constant publicity. When a collection is made, it should 
be counted by two persons and one should carry the 
offering away for deposit, the other should keep a record 
of amounts collected. Every expenditure should be 
audited by a disinterested third party or committee at 
least once a year. The congregation should be kept in- 
formed frequently—that is, as often as four times a 


184 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


year—of the amount in each fund of the church and of 
the use to which it is being put. If the objection is 
made that the country church has no persons sufficiently 
able for this service, the answer is that the women in 
the country are peculiarly suited to the care of funds 
and they should be entrusted with at least their share 
of this responsibility. For instance, if a man and a 
woman should count the offerings every Sunday and on 
every occasion of receiving funds, the one, preferably 
the man, should be entrusted with the cash, the other, 
the woman, should keep the record. 

Church funds should also be deposited in a public 
place, preferably in the nearest bank in an account in 
the name of the church and of the fund to which the 
money belongs. The account should be open to inquiry 
and inspection by any citizen of the community. If a 
bank is not convenient for weekly deposit, the funds 
should be entrusted to a merchant or other experienced 
business man, who should be instructed to welcome in- 
quiry. 

The purpose of publicity concerning the funds of the 
church is the establishment of the same confidence in 
regard to church money as prevails in the handling of 
funds throughout the business world. Country churches 
fail because their financial standards are inferior to 
those of the merchant and the banker, who profess no 
exceptional moral standards, but meet the obligations 
incident to trust funds. A church treasurer who is un- 
wise enough to handle public money without audit, in- 
spection, or report deserves to be severely condemned, 


COUNTRY-CHURCH FINANCES 185 


and the church that permits him to do so is likely to be 
destroyed. 

Great advancement has been made in a generation 
toward the sanctifying of the individual gifts to the 
Lord. The envelop system, as it is called, is a demo- 
cratic method of contribution in which the gifts of 
the poor have the same appearance as the gifts of the 
rich. The envelop filled with pennies weighs as much 
as one filled with dollars. The envelop system also is 
one of regular contribution suited to an industrialized 
people who live a regular life. It fits the wage-earner 
and the salaried man perfectly. It does not so well fit 
the irregular income of the country, where wages are 
paid to but few and income is not periodically received, 
but it assists country people by a weekly reminder that 
at every service of worship they have a part that is 
voluntary whereby to express themselves. 

But the envelop system, indeed the whole organization 
of finance which prevails in Protestant churches, is an 
expression of a fellowship of service and of purpose, the 
power of which has not been yet fully realized. The dif- 
ferent Protestant communions, founded as they are in 
an original unity of belief and an experience of hos- 
pitality, are, as they become more worldly-wise and less 
simple, kept together by common purposes of service 
to the world and to the nation. They give their money 
and they offer themselves to the extension of the ideals 
they possess: that is, to the enlargement of their fellow- 
ship. They undertake to back their ideals with their 
gifts; they have a great pride in the size of the amounts 


186 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


they give. Some denominations are animated by a 
fellowship of giving. The whole enterprise of church 
finance has become a bond of union, because it is an 
expression of a common purpose. 

The small community has responded better than the 
large one to the big financial drives. These undertak- 
ings have impressed the members of small churches as 
they do not impress the more experienced church mem- 
bers. No other bond has been felt with so great force, by 
the little churches, as the opportunity offered them to 
contribute to the large funds raised by the denomina- 
tions. The great drives during the World War brought 
surprising returns from the people in the little towns and 
in the open country. Never before had they found their 
way into the fellowship of big enterprises. They enter- 
tained the same ideas and had the same purpose, but no 
opportunity had come to them for the expression, in a 
practical way, of their faith and their sympathy. The 
writer is convinced, therefore, from observation of 
country churches in the past ten years, that the ex- 
perience of systematic giving will extend among them 
and provide a stimulus to common response on a large 
scale. 

The experience of doing business is one of the ad- 
vantages, to obscure persons, offered by systematic giv- 
ing. This, I think, is why women enter into church 
work, especially the business activities of the church, 
with such zeal. Money is the most far-reaching medium 
offered to their control. They can express themselves 
in caring for church funds even if they cannot speak, 
or write, or administer large affairs. Systematic giv- 


COUNTRY-CHURCH FINANCES 187 


ing also teaches order and regularity. It provides a 
framework of purpose that undergirds the whole struc- 
ture of religion, and it tends to make religious habits 
regular. 

The small country churches give more, in proportion 
to their numbers and financial abilities, than do the 
large churches. This surprising discovery is made by 
Mr. Luther Fry in his careful sifting of the materials 
of the Interchurch World Movement. In his book 
‘‘Diagnosing the Rural Church”’ he says: 


The churches in rich counties do not give a larger propor- 
tion of their income to missionary and benevolent enterprises 
than churches in poor areas give. Indeed, the smallest pro- 
portions donated to benevolences were contributed not in 
the group of poorest counties but in the $20,000 to $30,000 
farm-value group.... It means that the church members 
in wealthy areas are not contributing their proportionate 
shares to the benevolent enterprises of their denominations. 
True, our prosperously situated churches give about the same 
percentage of their total budget to benevolence as do the 
poor churches; but since it has already been shown that 
this total budget steadily declines in relative value as economic 
conditions improve, it follows that contributions to beney- 
olences also show a downward tendency when considered in 
relation to the means at the disposal of the people. In 
other words, if we think of benevolences in terms of the 
financial sacrifices involved, rather than in terms of dollars 
and cents, the poor counties make a far better showing than 
the more wealthy areas. 


Mr. Fry finds this disproportion so general in the 
oifts of the counties studied that he exhorts the de- 


188 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


nominational executives to assess a larger proportionate 
quota upon the larger and wealthier churches, than upon 
those in poorer areas of the country, in order better to 
distribute the load. He gives as reason for this greater 
giving of the smallest churches, which are most numer- 
ous in the poorer farming sections, the fact that the 
church program is about the same in both sections and 
costs nearly the same amount to maintain, and that it 
is therefore a matter of sheer survival for the poorer 
ehurehes to pay that which the wealthier ones contrib- 
ute with ease. The very existence of religion being at 
stake in smaller and poorer places of worship, those 
who worship there have a training in giving which is de- 
nied to the richer churches. 

What has been said cannot apply to a good many 
small religious enterprises. We have, and we ought to 
have, in the country many little chapels in which men 
have small responsibility. They are places of worship 
and meeting only. It is impossible to plan for their 
congregations an elaborate system of giving, nor would 
it be well if it could be done. These small preaching- 
places and ‘‘chapels of ease’’ should be organized under 
the lead of central churches, that have good ministers 
and express in a complete way the participation of the 
worshiper in the big affairs of Christendom. Such a 
ehurch should be within driving distance of every farm- 
house. There should be in every hamlet a _ well- 
organized congregation, and within easy reach a minister 
in residence. These two requirements necessitate a 
systematic organization of the giving of the people. 

The beginnings of church administration are at this 


COUNTRY-CHURCH FINANCES 189 


point. Many superintendents who have not yet dreamed 
that theirs is an art that may be taught, are attentive 
to the financial side of church work. It is unfortunate 
that the only management they know is the management 
of money: but it is well to make a beginning somewhere. 
Let us be thankful that the small church is coming under 
a systematic rule, that its processes are brought to book 
at one point. We may hope that in a generation the 
other measurable elements of church work will be as 
well superintended. 

What, then, are the elements of finance for the small 
church ? | 

First, the farmer’s church ought to be taught the im- 
portance and the spiritual worth of money. Its. people 
are to learn from many sources that money is expected 
of them. They should learn that this is well and not 
ill, that it is good and not bad. For the farmer desires 
money for himself; he ought to be consistent enough to 
desire it for the Lord. It is not sufficient for the min- 
ister to preach and teach about the mission causes pro- 
moted by the church. The mind of country people is 
dogmatic, speculative; they dream and reason much. 
They rationalize everything. The minister must, there- 
fore, do more than exhort them to support particular 
causes. They must be taught the philosophy under- 
lying the financial mobilization of wealth. 

Agriculture itself is being valued at every point in 
dollars and cents. The farmer’s church, in the same 
manner, must learn to give in order that the church may 
be the ideal expression of its members. If the farmer 
goes to market and gets money for goods, then he must 


190 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


vo to church and give money to the Lord, or his life 
will be inconsistent and his religion ineffective. So that 
the preacher must be a prophet of the modern spirit. 
He must teach the spiritual value of material things, es- 
pecially the spiritual joy of contribution. 

Secondly, the church in the country ought to learn to 
give rather than to raise money by indirection. The 
chief expenses of the church should be met by contri- 
bution directly made. It is well to give entertainments 
for a charge, but it is much more important that those 
who trade in the small values of the religious group 
should express their relation to the church in propor- 
tionate and systematic giving. 

In supplement to the free gifts, every church in the 
country might well develop a second kind of finance in 
connection with the organized recreative life of the 
church. Entertainments ought to be paid for, lectures 
may be marketed, stereopticon and moving-picture 
shows should more than pay for themselves. These 
enterprises ought not to be despised or called unspirit- 
ual. The church needs a great variety of members, 
and some persons, whose spirituality is not of the low- 
est, enjoy doing business in the interest of religion. 
Frequently one meets a man or woman in business 
whose ideals are of the highest, whose character is ex- 
cellent, but who proposes a business enterprise in con- 
nection with the church. There are many commodities 
that are by-products of a religious society. These 
ought not to be given away, but should be sold. No 
chureh should depend, however, upon profits from the 
sale of its by-products; its dependence should be upon 


COUNTRY-CHURCH FINANCES 191 


the gifts of the people, because the church is a school 
of giving in a population commercialized. But the 
commercial spirit is good, not evil, the joy of trading is 
very human. It is quite as worthy as the joy of preach- 
ing or singing, and some persons have more to offer in 
the way of trade, others in the way of song or rhetoric. 
A church should not despise the contributions of the 
trader, but welcome them and use them. 

The community church is a many-celled organization. 
The heart of it is a place of worship, but the services 
it renders to the community are in many cases mer- 
chantable and they should be sold. Some of them 
should pay for themselves and relieve the church of ex- 
pense. A few of them should bring in revenue. 

An important factor in the development of the small 
church is the separation of the services rendered by the 
church from the other religious activities. The one 
ought not to depend for financial support upon the 
other. Services should be paid for, worship should be 
a gift. The offices responsible for community work 
ought to be organized separately and should function in 
a way of their own, so as not to interfere with the work 
and activities of worship, religious education, and the 
eare of souls. For instance, the community house at 
Lingle, Wyoming, has a community board under whose 
care are all the operations of the house. The church 
has its own officers and its own expenses; its canvass 
for contributions is made in the month of March. The 
community house has its expenses, some of which are of 
a business character. Its canvass for subscriptions is 
made in the month of November. The two canvasses 


192 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


are so managed as to interfere in no way with each 
other. The even more separate character of a com- 
munity house in California is exhibited in the fact that 
the property is owned not by the congregation but by 
the Presbytery of which the congregation is a member. 
Experience shows that this method of financing social 
work under a separate board and by a special process 
is more effectual than the management of the whole by 
the so-called spiritual officers. 

Probably the highest value of financial management 
of church affairs is the training it gives to the individ- 
ual and to the pastor who is interested in the develop- 
ment of personality. There is a thrill in finding the 
man for the task and the task for the man. The good 
manager knows what a day’s work is, and many a small 
church has justified itself to the minister and to the 
members by the experience of joy in responsibility 
given and responsibility undertaken. I remember a 
humble Christian in a small church who had never found 
his place. He had few abilities and those he had were 
hidden by a modesty and dignity that gave him beauty 
and imparted a glow to his person. Almost by accident 
he assumed the care of church property. At once his 
whole life took on for himself and his fellow members a 
value that it had never had before. 

The development of church business offers an inviting 
field, therefore, to the members and the minister in 
small communities for the development of personal 
character. Some of the largest enterprises of the pres- 
ent world, projects which span the earth and plumb 
the depths of human experience, are discussed in the 


COUNTRY-CHURCH FINANCES 193 


meetings of church stewards and deacons in a village 
parsonage. Doctrine no longer unites men with so 
penetrating a sympathy as the management of the gifts 
of humble Christians to the missionary and benevolent 
enterprises of the church. 


CHAPTER XV 


A WORD TO BISHOPS AND SECRETARIES 


HE city, the bishop, and quantity produc- 
tion in religion are growing dangers to the 
farmer’s church. All of them are modern 
dangers. They express the competing forces of the 
present day organized for conquest and extension. 
They are impersonal, while the country church is in- 
dividualistic. They are authoritative in the face of its 
independence. They brook no opposition, but rule by 
concentrated force. 

The city claims what it desires. Ministers of country 
churches are hypnotized by the attentions of city 
churches and unable to resist their call. The modern 
city claims as its own what it requires for the growth 
of its extraordinary life. There was never anything 
like it before, and other forms of life are unprepared 
for its attack. The city grows with ever-accelerating 
speed. In its plans for transit as well as in its quest 
of supplies of water, the city knows no limit in its ag- 
gression. To other and small communities the city 
comes with no discussion of equal interests, but as a 
rapacious creature armed with power beyond appeal. 


Chicago argues that if it is not permitted to draw more 
194 


A WORD TO BISHOPS AND SECRETARIES 195 


of the water of the lakes into its drainage canal, the sew- 
age incident to its vastly increased size will pollute the 
ways of life of all the people of the middle West. New 
York reaches out one hundred miles to take the waters 
of a peaceful river to satisfy its necessities, though to 
do so means the destruction of a score of towns that have 
dwelt upon its banks for as long as New York has dwelt 
by the salt ocean. They have no recourse, In fact, the 
forces commanded by the city are of such a character as 
to forestall opposition. Probably the farmers and vil- 
lagers whose lands New York city paid for, that it might 
fiood them, were willing to sell. For the city commands 
the ways of modern life. 

In church matters the city influence works with as 
ruthless a hand as in civies or finance. City ministers 
assume and exercise immunity for the administrative 
machinery of the church, The churches in cities do the 
same; their officers speak with condescension of the con- 
ference, presbytery, or association to which they belong. 
Methodist churches in cities have for a generation been 
independent of the itineracy, choosing their pastors 
freely and requiring the bishop’s assent. By the same 
process rural churches are the more enslaved to the 
bishop’s mandate. 

The administrator of church work ought to be the 
friend of the small and weak. The bishop should exist 
to help equalize the resources of the church so that the 
poor should have their share, and to lift the strain from 
the weak to the shoulders of the strong. But alas! most 
administrators exploit the country churches in the in- 
terest of every ‘‘larger call.’’ Bishops and other admin- 


196 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


istrators have no other class of churches under their 
hands so great in numbers or so useful to authority as 
the rural churches. So that these congregations among 
the farmers or along the village street, that in their 
nature are most independent, are become the pawns in 
the denominational game. Those in the neighborhood of 
theological seminaries are made use of by the seminary. 
Before them students preach, for the stipend paid, ‘‘in 
order that they might support themselves while in semi- 
nary.’’ The rural churches enjoy the process so long 
as they survive. Their ‘‘student supplies’’ seldom give 
them any vital service, being concerned with ‘‘higher’’ 
interests. Many of them live meagerly, and some die 
of starvation, because they are exploited, not served, by 
student preachers. 

These congregations are treated as statistical quanti- 
ties, and all interest in the individual church is sunk in 
the mass effect. The denominations are instructed in 
quantity production. They desire numbers, both of 
members and of congregations. The many small congre- 
gations seem to offer the field in which campaigns will 
produce results and programs will multiply the numbers 
reported. As a matter of experience, the latest decade 
of church history in the United States has been a time 
of the most energetic campaigning since the days of 
Peter the Hermit and of the Black Prince, yet two of 
the strongest denominations have had to record great 
losses among their rural churches. Campaigns and 
programs will never revive; they can only exploit and 
weaken the farmer’s church. Of all our churches, it is 
the most sensitive to the spirit and the teaching. Give 


A WORD TO BISHOPS AND SECRETARIES 197 


the farmer’s church—which hates the harness of man- 
agement—a message, infuse it with life, and it will grow: 
exploit it as a shop product of religion and it will die. 

One of the injustices of mass control of country 
churches is the church year. In American Protestant 
churches we have no saints, but the year is full of 
“‘days.’’ There is a Children’s Day, Mother’s Day, 
Rally Day, and each reform dear to a section of the 
church people claims its day. The baffled and hard- 
working pastor is assailed with demands for a day on 
which to advocate the claims of many ‘‘outside’’ causes. 
He scarce has time to preach, unless he turns aside the 
demands, that come with weighty authority, for. the 
recital from his pulpit of right or wrong, good or evil, 
in respect to some ‘‘problem.’’ | 

But the churches themselves have a round of work 
that must be distributed in the course of the year. 
Rally Day is appointed for the early autumn because 
then in city churches people have resumed church at- 
tendance after the summer holiday. The country 
churches do not need to be rallied in the autumn. To 
them the summer is the most active period. They 
should be rallied at Easter-time, in the spring. Again, 
the Annual Every-Member Canvass of Protestant 
churches, for the soliciting of subscriptions for the 
church budget, is placed by authority in the month of 
March. There could not be a worse time in the year 
for churches dependent upon the farmer. At that sea- 
son he has to lay out money. His crop must be put into 
the ground. His heaviest expenses are then in the im- 
mediate future. His church canvass should come in the 


198 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


month of November, when in the north-temperate climate 
he has harvested and marketed his crops. If he is in 
funds at any season in the year, he has money ‘then. 
Why should the farmer be called on to subscribe to the 
church budget of expenditures just when he must borrow 
for the season’s heaviest investment? In this manner 
the process of church work is distributed in accordance 
with the finances of the few churches in the cities, 
and not in accordance with the finances of the great ma- 
jority which are in the big towns and in the open 
country, where the conditions of farm life prevail. 

The rhythm of church life is thus placed in recogni- 
tion of the city because city men have organized the 
church year, but in most Protestant denominations the 
country churches—that is, those in communities of ten 
thousand or less in population—are about 80 per cent. 
of the total number, and the city churches, which are 
not dependent upon the farmer for their seasonal proc- 
ess, are less than 20 per cent. in number. Thus 80 per 
cent. of the ministers are required to conform to the 
convenience of 20 per cent. of the ministers. It is true 
that the city churches have more than 20 per cent. of the 
membership, but city churches are less dependent upon 
denominational arrangements. The system is thus a 
disadvantage to the more numerous country churches, 
yet it is pursued with calm disregard of the needs of the 
greater number: who are more in need of administrative 
service. 

The system of benevolences of the churches proceeds 
by the assignment of a quota to the rural churches. 
But a careful study, such as was made by C. Luther Fry 


A WORD TO BISHOPS AND SECRETARIES 199 


in ‘‘Diagnosing the Rural Church,’’ shows that the 
quota is laid with unjust severity upon the small church. 
After demonstrating that the country church gives more, 
in proportion to its wealthy members, than the city 
church does, and that the poor counties in the country 
give with greater sacrifice than the richer churches give, 
because the cost of running a small church is about the 
Same as running a big one, Mr. Fry says: 


The explanation of this lies in the fact that the small church 
from a purely financial point of view is an expensive operat- 
ing unit. The ordinary church program requires that mem- 
bers secure the services of a minister and keep the church 
building in repair, besides meeting certain denominational as- 
sessments. If the membership is very small these few people 
must meet these basic requirements or disband. Thus, in a 
ehurch of small membership giving on a relatively large scale 
is a necessity; while in a church with many members the 
expenses are spread over the larger number and therefore in- 
volve less cost to the individual, and a small church in spite 
of its increased running expenses is usually asked to con- 
tribute exactly the same amount of money for these items 
(missions and benevolences) as a large church. 


Mr. Fry then shows that the larger church lays upon 
its members a proportionately smaller share of running 
expenses, and he adds: 


It might be desirable to assess the large churches in ac- 
cordance with a sliding scale, so that churches with large 
membership would be asked to give larger donations per 
member than small churches. . . . In churches of small mem- 
bership giving becomes a life or death matter to the church 
and the individual members therefore make comparatively 


200 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


large sacrifices; while in a church of large membership the 
costs of operation are borne by a larger number and thus 
less money is required from each member. 


If this argument is correct, then the distribution of 
a denominational quota should be so organized in respon- 
sible communions as to distribute the load and to increase 
the willingness with which it is borne, as well as to se- 
cure the larger total for the general work of the church 
in the world. These benevolence quotas are a new ex- 
perience of the churches. They are as yet crudely or- 
ganized. The church officials who have the matter in 
charge have had no time to perfect their approach with 
a fair regard for the varying conditions of church life. 
Is it unfair to ask that the knowledge of the country 
church now in our possession be employed as a means of 
securing justice in the development of this new expe- 
rience? : 

The spirit of mass production in religion demands the 
extension of the church. We must every year hear of 
more units added. Profound disappointment is ex- 
pressed in any denomination that fails to report a large 
number of accessions on confession of faith in any given 
year. Even the daily newspapers commented adversely 
in years following the war upon those communions that 
did not report an increase. The appetite for an in- 
creased membership and for a greater number of con- 
tributions is universal. The time has come when the 
extension of the church cannot be carried on without in- 
justice to the country people, unless denominations 
make as much of reconciling their differences in the small 


A WORD TO BISHOPS AND SECRETARIES 201 


communities as they do of extending into unchurched 
places. The mere pressure to place a church of every 
denomination in every community has become an abuse 
that makes the churches ashamed; while the number of 
places unchurched, that know not the Gospel by the 
teaching of any of the great communiong, is still consid- 
erable. Reliable information? concerning the 73,230 
different communities that have less than 5000 popula- 
tion is to the effect that 10,461 of them have no church of 
any denomination; that 33,800 have churches but no res- 
ident minister; and that 16,258 more lack a full-time 
resident minister. The remaining 12,711 communities, 
being 21 per cent. of all town and country communities, 
in which dwell 28 per cent. of the town and country 
population, have full-time resident pastors. 

Unseemly conditions are revealed such as appear in 
the statement that ‘‘the denominations seem now to be 
sending their strong man to the weak church in the over- 
echurehed community and their weak minister to the 
promising field where there is no other church.’’ Com- 
petition puts religion to death. If we are to continue 
to extend, we must learn in every denomination a tech- 
nique of cooperation with other faiths lke our own. 
The genius for extension is a very precious thing in the 
American churches. It has stimulated them to reach 
every community in the United States. As the popula- 
tion has flowed out to possess the land, preachers have 
followed to sanctify home life and to lay social founda- 
tions. No other type of social work has equaled the 


2“The Town and Country Church,’ Morse and Brunner. 
Doran. 1923. 


. 


202 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


churches’ power of extension, unless it be the public 
school which, like popular religion, has organized its 
units in every small place. The churches have extended 
their Sunday-schools I suppose beyond any other volun- 
tary type of human organization in the United States. 

The little congregations have set up their altars in 
every place where men could meet. There is danger 
that this spirit will be discouraged if we do not by 
authority persuade and by administrative arrangements 
determine that the abuses incident to extension are not 
in the end to overcome its benefits in the minds of the 
American people. 

There are certain measures that ought now to be taken 
by church officials. Granted that the spirit of competi- 
tion is in the very minds of Americans, there remains 
still a field in which the church administrator can effect 
changes. Up to this date no denomination of which I 
know is promoting comity. The best of the denomina- 
tions contribute of their means to the Federal Council, 
Home Missions Council, to state, city, and county feder- 
ations, which zealous men maintain. But no communion 
makes cooperation with other bodies a regular part of its 
work as all of them make extension a regular objective. 
I hope to see in the early future a plan of comity pro- 
posed not alone by a federation, which has no authority, 
but by a conference, an association, a classis, or a presby- 
tery; in which resides the power of Protestants to act. 
Suppose, for instance, one of these governing bodies 
should after discussion of the situation within its bounds 
decide upon a program about as follows, which its min- 


A WORD TO BISHOPS AND SECRETARIES 208 


isters must announce in communities suffering from de- 
nominational competition: 


1 This church ministers in this community in competition 
with fellow churches of like tradition with ourselves 
unwillingly. 

2 We find that summary withdrawal from the community is 
impracticable. 

3 This congregation therefore makes the following offers: 
conditional upon their acceptance by other [specified] 
congregations :— 

a We will unite with other like churches in as many serv- 
ices of worship in the round of the year and in the course 
of each week as possible. 

b We offer to unite with others [specified] in Ne 
a common Sunday-school. 

4 We offer to federate this church with any ahi of like 
faith and tradition on the following terms: 

a The churches federated shall enter with equal rights, each 
preserving its integrity in a local congregation. This local 
congregation may be visited by the local denominational 
superintendents; its component members shall be reported 
each to his own denomination regularly. Each member of the 
federated church may contribute to the denomination of his 
choice and the regular contributions for benevolences shall 
be distributed to the denominations entering into the federa- 
tion in equal parts. Each congregation shall regularly fune- 
tion, under the leadership of the pastor to be chosen by all. 

b The control of all local expenses shall be in the federated 
congregation as a whole, which shall meet at least once a 
year for the election of common officers and the determi- 
nation of questions that concern the community and the 


204 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


congregation. One minister shall be appointed to have 

charge of the congregation and he shall be chosen freely by 

the federated church acting as one body. 

5 This congregation, in view of the situation, offers when- 
ever a like offer is made by one, two or more [specified] 
congregations serving in this community to hold a meet- 
ing in common with them, officially announced, at which 
shall be determined the future of the work of these con- 
gregations in this community. 


If any denomination were to commit itself, through 
one of its authoritative bodies, to such a program of com- 
ity, it would disarm criticism, it would win to itself many 
adherents who are impatient of the present competitive 
system, and it would break the dead-lock in certain com- 
munities, as well as save monies now expended in hope- 
less competition, and the energies of pastors that are 
spent in humiliating strife. Above all, the church 
officials should realize that the strain upon ministers who 
are called on to serve in competitive fields is beyond the 
endurance of the human spirit. Religion cannot survive 
in the hearts of men who are commanded by their church 
to minister in country towns where there are too many 
churches and where competition rather than cooperation 
is made the Christian duty. | 

Further, the denominational leaders should take meas- 
ures now, when their people no longer believe that salva- 
tion is for their sect alone, to keep the Kingdom of God 
before the mind of every member of the community. 
The present state of mind of the church member is en- 
gaged not upon the Kingdom but upon his church. The 


A WORD TO BISHOPS AND SECRETARIES 205 


minister and the parishioner in the usual small com- 
munity in the United States has in mind all the processes 
of the community, except what other churches are doing. 
Ask a man who lives in a town of less than ten thousand 
population what the other church is doing. As a rule 
he will cast the question lightly aside, or if pressed, 
will be found ignorant about it. He usually knows 
about the Catholic Chureh in a way, but about the 
Protestant churches other than his own he knows noth- 
ing; yet he is informed about the fire department, the 
library, and the Red Cross. If he is a Presbyterian, his 
mind is impregnable to facts about the Baptist Church. 
There ought to be maps kept before the minds of all 
members by the leading denominations which would 
show all the churches of any given place. In the future 
it should be considered a spiritual offense to draw a 
map or make a reference to a community without regard 
to the whole of religious life in that place. How far 
from this is our present practice! 

The most important service to be rendered by these 
means will be the uniting of Protestantism for an 
approach to the unoccupied fields and the building in 
needy communities, by devoted workers, of church plants 
suitable to the needs of the people who live there. We 
cannot forever extend if we lose the support of those 
men and women in our churches who would be offended 
by competition. The sums to be controlled by the 
churches are limited. They will do well if they keep 
these funds from decreasine—supposing that their total 
will not be greatly increased—and use them for the ex- 


‘206 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


tension of the Gospel and the building of adequate edi- 
fices in every part of the United States and her pos- 
Sessions. 

In the first century of extension of American churches 
no strong control was necessary ; not even an intensive 
supervision of the congregations was required. But 
that time is at anend. Authority is now indeed only in- 
direct. The power of bishops is not absolute and in 
theory administrators have no control. But by the 
genius of these Protestant churches the administrator 
has come to the front in the past twenty years. The 
more independent of the churches have lodged the 
greater power in the hands of chosen men, selected for 
this purpose without ornate installation or formal title, 
who have a great responsibility. These administrators, 
bishops, and secretaries are still puzzled to know what is 
their function and what their power. The opposition to 
their appointment has failed to forestall the committal 
of great funds to them. Their opportunity has come. 
The service they should render is the redirecting of the 
spirit of extension by ending the abuse of competition, 
equipping the weaker communities with buildings and a 
Service adequate to the needs of American Christianity 
and thus girding the national religion up for its task 
upon this continent. This responsibility is a trust com- 
mitted to the church administration. 


XY 


CHAPTER XVI 


TO THE PREACHER 


Plainly, we are not to save the world by preaching. 

Outside the churches better preaching is sometimes 
done than within them. There are newspaper preachers 
and radio homilists. Every school-teacher exhorts. Pol- 
iticians attain their ends if they have a prophetic gift. 
Reformers are eloquent in use of religious arguments. 
It would appear at present that preaching is not a func- 
tion peculiar to the church; and, alas! many who are 
ealled to preach do not excel as orators but survive by 
the possession of some other gifts unsuspected before! 
It becomes evident that preaching is simply the service 
for which ministers are paid. It is the metal that is 
coined to provide a currency of the churches. A price 
can be put, without great damage to spiritual things, 
upon the homiletic gift. It would not be safe to charge 
for other things done by a shepherd of souls. Most of 
the work of a man of God is unpaid and should be be- 
yond price. But it does no great harm to commercialize 
the pulpit as we have done. At least, if there is poison 
in it, we have digested the poison and accommodated our 


spiritual organism to its ill effects. We want more 
207 


[ becomes the preacher to be modest, to-day. 


208 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


preaching, and for the sake of the great good it discovers 
we can stand all the damages it does. 

Probably the minister of religion is more often use- 
ful in his services on the day of trouble and of joy,—as 
a philosopher to whom the sinner can go, as an adviser 
of the young, a companion dear to the aged,—when he 
helps men bear the burden and meet the problems of life. 
Power to fill each role is a rare gift sent from heaven. 
Prophetic gifts are given to very few, but many a 
commonplace man, by the devotion of his spirit, by the 
eandor of his invincible self-sacrifice, has brought men 
near to God and testified dumbly in the language of 
habits, so well as to secure assent that eloquence could 
not have gotten. Great preaching has a high place, and 
it requires rare ability to perform well that part. The 
great sermon and the great address will be made by few, 
but they will be circulated extensively in the press, over 
the radio, at political meetings, and in the huge gather- 
ings of churchmen that occur almost every year. 

There will always be occasion for great preaching. 
But in every community we need the voice of the 
preacher concerning daily matters. The materials of 
homily are worn out. The preacher ought to turn aside 
from the path of present custom and dignify the com- 
mon life. He should choose humbler topies than he does, 
covering a wider variety, and reach more intimately 
into the life of the people. The time has come when we 
can preach as a voice bade us long ago: 


Cleave the wood and you will find me: 
Lift the stone and there am I. 


TO THE PREACHER 209 


The poet is an inspired man and we ought not to be deaf 
forever to his voice when he tells us ‘‘there are sermons 
in stones, books in the running brooks.’’ We should 
turn aside from the polemical tracts and commentaries, 
from the conventional theology, and hear the Mas- 
ter’s voice in the daily round of life. There alone 
did he speak when his voice was heard. But under 
Greek influence we have systematized the teachings 
of Christ. We made them political teachings in the 
middle ages. And nowadays we in the United States 
are harnessing the power of Christ to our temporary re- 
forms. ay 

The life of people in the country is full of strain and 
sacrifice ; it has joy and worth which preachers ought to 
see and exalt. Instead they draw their images from an- 
cient wars and old pilgrimages, from prophetic inter- 
pretations of days that are long past, the meaning of 
which is not quite clear to us who live to-day. The 
preacher ought to be a prophet of religious life to young 
people. He should forget that he belongs to a caste. 
Let him speak to the heart of the man who works four- 
teen hours a day in an ill-paid occupation, animated by 
the love of the land and of the care of cattle, the desire to 
support his family, and the dream of feeding the world. 
The minister is very often a farmer’s son, but as preacher 
he forgets the religion that was his father’s and talks 
about the religion of the clergyman. He tries to im- 
pose on a hard-working population the ethics and 
ideals of a non-productive, salaried profession. 

No man can advise another except to point the road. 
I have a few suggestions to make that may indicate the 


210 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


path the preacher ought to take if he would build up 
the church among those who produce. 

There is high authority for the prohibition that for- 
bids the minister to preach farming; and, for my part, 
I suppose good manners would forbid his direct exhorta- 
tion as to better farm practices. But who would for- 
bid his preaching fertility, which is the mysterious work 
of the Creator? It differs from creation, which a man 
can accomplish; for the human factor is so small in fer- 
tility and the divine so amazingly great. 

A prairie farmer planted soy-beans upon acres which 
had for years been producing twenty bushels, and the 
production mounted at once to seventy bushels of 
golden corn. What a miraculous increase! For years 
the toil upon that impoverished land had been in- 
creasingly hard; each season it had been less reward- 
ing. Now the tiller of the soil is confronted with God. 
He realizes the Creator’s plans to feed the world. 
Fertility means less labor for men, more enjoyment 
of divine miracle. 

Yet the human factor in fertilization is essential. 
Nature is profuse and inconstant. Man has to ad- 
minister for his needy race the providence of God. 
The basis of this administration of fertility is the serv- 
ice of domestic plants and animals. He plants the 
former, cherishes their better seed strains; selects and 
breeds and feeds the latter, with the end in view of the 
greatest production. Through the control of these 
creatures of God, man is able to live on earth in that 
degree of comfort and vigor which befits Christian liv- 


ing. 


ee 


TO THE PREACHER 211 


Without this surplus created by the excessive pro- 
duction of wheat, and the abundance of the udder of 
the cow, it would be impossible, so far as I can see, for 
the Bible-reading Christians to be on earth. Is it pos- 
sible for a people without sheep to live generally after 
the Bible manner? Can a nation that does not eat meat 
daily worship God after the dictates of its own con- 
science? JI think not. If the time ever comes when 
men cannot wear a wool coat they will not long be 
Protestants. 

Right here comes an encouragement to preach. fer- 
tility, for it is usually not granted man unless he at 
least strikes the rock for water more times than Moses 
did. Few lands respond without the application of 
brains and sweat, even to the rotation of corn, wheat, 
and clover. Only with stress and strain does fertility 
reward the farmer; and the struggle makes for char- 
acter. To touch the hand of God under the soil, where 
‘He creates and multiplies, develops manhood, piety, 
constancy, austerity, heroism. I heard Jared van 
Wagenen—who is the third Dutch Jared on the same 
farm near the Catskill Mountains—say that we may 
thank God his secrets of the soil are uncovered with 
difficulty and his treasures inherited with toil; because 
the toil makes men, and the difficulties toughen Chris- 
tian character. 

The time seems to have come again in the world for 
men to preach fertility; and again the spirit to do it 
is here. Famine has come back. In China, we were 
recently told, fifteen millions were to die of hunger be- 
fore the summer. Fifteen millions to die of hunger, 


212 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


in a year; whereas in four years of war only eight 
millions died! If we preach peace, we may as well, for 
the same reasons, preach fertility; for only by more 
fertile yields can all men be regularly fed. The old 
methods which feed China have no margin for a year 
of crop-failure. There must be a miracle. Some Jo- 
seph must dream again. His invention must be recorded 
at the Patent Office and tested in the laboratories, be- 
fore China can be sure that famine will not again leap 
out of the dark winter, to destroy millions. 

Famine has come back in a time when we no longer 
bow the neck to its stroke. A new spirit has come, even 
since the Thirty Years’ War. Codperative organization 
has been devised, tested, and extended, which gives to 
poor producers great collective power. Farm machinery 
has quickened the horny hand of the man-with-the-hoe 
into the dexterous fingers of the skilled mechanic, and 
substituted for the stout back of the reaper the power 
of the tractor. Leguminous crops have multiplied the 
yield of the acre and given immortality to old lands, 
fertility to barren soil. Cow-testing and _ selective 
breeding have doubled the butter yield of a nation of 
cows. Seed-selection has uniformed and controlled the 
higher yields. Cold storage and grain elevators, with 
universal, mobile transportation, have given to the 
world long, unbroken years of uniform supply of food, 
cheap enough for the poor, at even prices. Yet famine 
has come! 

In spite of all improvements, the margin of the 
world’s food-supply is narrow. The world is astonished 


TO THE PREACHER 213 


that the reserves which are piled up in banks and ware- 
houses, mobilized by steam transportion, are insufficient. 
We know the mind of God better than to submit will- 
ingly to famine as a yearly experience, or to endure 
the fear of famine. Yet we see that inventions and de- 
vices, useful as they are in multiplying the value of the 
toil of man, are insufficient. Is prayer, then, our only 
defense? It prepares us, indeed, for the battle. But 
men of prayer will do more. In future years mission- 
aries in China will be teaching agriculture, I dare be- 
lieve, who never before taught anything but words. 

Recent years have produced agricultural foreign 
missionaries, who teach the Hindu what God has taught 
us about old soils and new crops. They take time from 
preaching to study fertility ; and then go back to preach 
the providence of God that is waiting in the black clod, 
the plant, and the dairy cow, as a part of the unsearch- 
able riches of Christ. They represent many thought- 
ful Christians who believe that only by the power of 
God can the world’s food-supply be made to last. The 
miracle of the widow’s oil and meal is but a symbol of 
what India will do when foreign missions rise to the 
boldness and faith of Elijah. 

The preacher of fertility discovers that God is not 
a potentate doing things by special interferences, but a 
Being of uniform and infallible action, who has fore- 
seen and foreknown; who can be depended on, lke to- 
morrow’s sun. The laws of fertility are like those of 
gravitation. They know no exception. They ‘‘cannot 
excuse themselves for seventy-five-per-cent. perform- 


214 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


ance.’’ God never changes his mind. Has no moods. 
Is not easily provoked. Causeth his rain to fall upon 
the just and the unjust. So that it is important that 
producers of food know that the providence of God 
plans through the miracle of fertility to abolish famine 
from the earth. 

It is a true miracle, fertility; it applies to the brain 
and heart of men as well as to the dust from which they 
were made. Inventions are the fertility of the brain. 
They are the workings of God. They have done more 
good and fed more, clothed more, than all the sermons 
that preachers have uttered about books and poems and 
pictures. Think what the inventions of Cyrus Mce- 
Cormick have done to create the type of farmer who 
lives in the middle West, to make cities; yes, even to 
give leisure for preachers and poets and writers to in- 
cubate immortal messages of inspiration. 

During the World War, when our boys must be fed 
that they might be brave enough to die for ideas, we 
learned to pray about food. We thought much, then, 
about farm labor and fertilizers, and came to know the 
excellence of wheat as ‘a food packed by the Creator for 
transportation. Surely now that peace has come—has 
it not come ?—we can preach about that for which then 
we prayed. 

The church and the nation are both indebted to the 
miracle of fertility for their moral power. Therefore 
the preacher may go to the farm for his theme, to the 
Bible for his text, and to the people for an assured 
sympathetic hearing. I suggest as his text Deuteronomy 
xi. 10-12. May the sermon disclose to the farmer that 





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TO THE PREACHER 215 


he owns some of the land which the Lord his God careth 
for; that ‘‘drinketh water of the rain of heaven.”’ 

The preacher should exalt the religion of sacred build- 
ings, for the message the house of worship tells the 
passer-by is too often a story of neglect. It may be the 
best evangel to all men. We were touring an old parish 
where the pastor had remained forty years. He is a 
power in the country life of three States. Suddenly 
Wwe came upon a well-kept church and parsonage, with 
a graveyard stretching behind them. I knew we had 
arrived at the home of a forty-year pastorate—that this 
could be no other. I had heard for years of the effective 
social program of this pastor. At a flash I saw that 
first in the program of a long pastorate must be the 
eare of the church property. 

What a powerful sermon this building a 
How beautifully the Gothic spire with the uplifting of 
the eyes elevated the feelings! How the well-kept 
chureh property on the village street schools the mind 
in order, thrift, and self-help! 

Not long ago I visited three country churches on a 
cold day. In each there were a score of persons huddled 
around the stove. The pastor and I stood afar, in the 
pulpit, with shaking knees, and preached or sang, our 
chins quivering with the chill in the air. The fires had 
been lighted in each church only a few minutes before 
church time. The big vault above never became warm 
while we were there. The only warmth was in the 
greetings at the close, for the people love their pastor. 
Those near the stove were scorched, not warm. The 
speakers went from the building to their closed car, with 


216 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


relief. The worshipers went home to their warm fire- 
sides and hot dinners, with still greater relief—all 
glad that it was over! 

Think of a church in a Western village of five hun- 
dred. It needs paint without and plaster within. The 
steps are falling to pieces and the yard is cleared of 
weeds only by the tramping feet of the children of the 
school on the same block. There is a resident minister, 
one of four in this town. He has seventy-six members 
to serve, none of whom is a farmer, so that he has plenty 
of time on his hands. Instead of rolling up his sleeves 
and repairing the house of God, he goes off to evangelize 
in other places. What can he preach about, whose own 
house of worship is neglected? 

The whole edifice used for worship should be rever- 
ently made fit for the Lord’s presence. It should be- 
come the outward form of the Presence, for which the 
people pray within its walls. An adequate heating- 
plant should be provided, with ample fuel supply, and 
the building should in cold weather be heated hours be- 
fore church time, so as to be comfortable and inviting. 
The grass should be well clipped, fences repaired and 
painted, trees not too many. The place of meeting of 
God’s people should be fair to the eye and dear to the 
memory. It pleads for God all the days under the sun 
and in the moonlight: not only Sundays, but seven days 
out of seven. The preacher’s doctrine cannot all be 
preached to the satisfaction of the doubters. Indeed, 
the divinest truths cannot rest on proof. They appeal 
to faith. But if they who accept them build and main- 
tain a place of worship that is beautiful and useful, 


TO THE PREACHER 217 


where the symbols of their faith are to be seen, men will 
know their sincerity. And if the preacher builds the 
house, men will believe his sermon. 

If religion be an experience of mystery, and if its end 
is attained in a sense of worth and value, then I think 
the minister ought to observe the things men live by, 
the exercises that give them high satisfaction. I was 
ealled away from a ‘‘bee’’ in New England, at which 
ten men and two teams were employed in volunteer 
service for the improvement of a community house. 
They were grading and building a terrace. My 
summons was to the graveyard three miles away, for 
the burial of a child. I suppose the pitiful occasion 
opened my heart and eyes. When I came back the 
teams were idle and the men were so absorbed in some 
task at one spot that they paid no attention to the 
passer-by. They had discovered that a massive boulder, 
which we had assumed we could not move, would re- 
spond to levers and crowbars. They had already moved 
it three feet down the hill and hoisted the heavy end 
two feet out of its bed. 

I stood a moment marveling at the zeal put into the 
matching of their wits and the power in their hands 
against that inert mass of rock. The older men had 
had experience in laying stone walls. They knew what 
could be done. The younger men shared the excitement 
of doing. 

All were absorbed in a mysterious joy in this triumph 
over a weight that seemed immovable. Little by little, 
an inch at a time, they brought the rock to a balance 
at which they could heave it over to its new place. 


218 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


Measures that were at first rejected as futile were all 
used in the intensive attack which forced the great 
weight along to its conquest. Finally with the help of 
the neighborhood tractor it was overturned with a great 
rush and lodged where it would be a foundation instead 
of an obstruction. 

I wondered at the human passion of this incident. 
I had never seen those men so aroused. Is it not pos- 
sible that the conquest of nature is still a creative 
passion that the preacher should interpret? I would 
have the preacher expound every process men live by, 
every passion that moves them to construction of good 
things, as a cooperation with the Almighty. Whatever 
is recorded in the Bible, every miracle of material con- 
struction related there, should be accepted as a working 
of the Holy Spirit and a fit theme for a preacher to use. 
May we not find a holy thing in the beautifying and 
dignifying of American lands, in making them fertile 
beyond their present measure and in terracing the hills 
for the sheer joy of the conquest of sterile soil, in 
foresting the barren mountains, and in restoring to dev- 
astated land in America that beauty which we praise 
and love in the western European countries from which 
we came? The motives of life are in the hands of the 
preacher. If the country preacher in the United States 
should declare the soil holy and preach the creation of 
God, he would summon the forces which are not at the 
beck of income or the call of wages. He would bring 
families from the city instead of sending them, as he 
now does, from the country; and he would begin to 
make it a holy land. 


CHAPTER XVII 


LENGTH OF SERVICE 


ONTINUANCE is essential to the soul. No less 
: a part is it of the conception of the family and 

the community. Life has little worth to a 
people among whom there is no hope of continuance. 
The soul aspires to enjoy the power of an endless life, 
the family needs to call one spot home for a hundred 
years, and the community should inhabit one hill-top 
or fertile valley for a thousand years. These are ex- 
pressions, I suppose, of the sense of the worth of life 
which is a teaching of all religions. 

This ideal of stability is broadly human. The old 
Mediterranean civilizations had it in the holy ground 
upon which the family dwelt. The gods of that ground 
were worshiped at the hearth. The paterfamilias was 
the head of an unbroken line, a potentate in little, whose 
authority was in theory absolute, because in him was the 
token of continuance. Rome was founded upon that 
idea; and Rome still stands, with lessons to teach un- 
stable America and Australia. China is a nation of 
villages. Every Chinese citizen is a member of his 
village; however far he roams, he belongs with his kins- 
men. The worth of life to him is in his name, which is 


the family cognomen of all the men of his village. 
219 


220 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


If any one of this generation thinks lightly of this 
ideal of stability, let him remember the World War, 
one of the causes of which was an excitement of all the 
cultured peoples of the world over the French foyer, 
or hearthstone. Deep in the heart of French civiliza- 
tion is this ideal of stability of the household. To-day, 
years after the World War, the world is still held back 
from resuming its many businesses by the problem of 
Reparations; at the center of which is the task of re- 
building the hearths and homes of France, destroyed 
by the German guns. Younger nations, like our own, 
profess to regard the place of the home as a matter of 
relative indifference, but we too are building cities upon 
continuing sites. Our towns and villages are themselves 
living forces where they stand to-day. Two generations 
ago we thought the farm home immortal and buried our 
dead in the soil consecrated to perpetual ownership by 
the family. We will come back to the ideal of the im- 
mortal farm home in some form comparable to that in 
which the French and the Chinese cherish it. For it 
is necessary to the religious feeling of the worth of our 
life. 

Recently the world that reads has been interested in 
the reports of French families who have lived longest 
upon their acres. We have looked, with the interest we 
devote to the great ones of the earth, upon Jean Guais, 
who has lived, in the direct line of his ancestors, upon 
the same acres in the department of Maine-et-Loire for 
six centuries. I remember the wonder and admiration 
that were aroused in New York State by Edward van 


LENGTH OF SERVICE 221 


Alstyne, whose family had dwelt at the time of his death 
upon their farm near Kinderhook, New York, for two 
hundred and fifty years. There are many farm homes 
in the Eastern States in which their present owners, 
fathers and sons, have dwelt for a century. In Lan- 
easter County, Pennsylvania, are farm families who 
have held title to the land for eight or nine generations. 
One is not surprised to find these households progressive 
in agriculture and responsible in support of their 
churches. 

The ministry has been affected in recent decades by 
the disturbance of the whole of American life and the 
mobilization of persons or families. In addition to the 
agrarian causes recited here, there are great changes 
centering in cities, that have unsettled all men. The 
great new inventions make possible the employment of 
many in cities, and their assembling there in vast 
numbers occasions the creation of a series of amuse- 
ments which attract even more than the wages. Such 
is the aspect of change that in two generations, it seems 
to a writer, ‘‘centuries, even millenniums, often separate 
a metropolis from the country that surrounds it.’’ It 
appears to the country-born resident of Chicago or 
Omaha that he has experienced in removal to the city 
the one great change. Life seems at last to have satis- 
fied its wants. Naturally the ministers of religion, who 
preach comfort and proclaim the worth of life, are 
moved by this revolution. Especially during their 
earlier years ministers regard the city as the terminus 
of endeavor. They try to get there as early in their 


222 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


ministry as possible. We are not old enough in our 
culture to command the best years of a man’s life for 
service away from the city. 

The influence of American religion itself is all away 
from stability. We have our own experience in re- 
ligion apart from that of western Europe. The Missis- 
sippi Valley has been more influential in unsettling the 
American minister than the shores of the Hellespont or 
the banks of the Rhine have been to dignify and estab- 
lish him. The circuit-rider still goes like a headless 
horseman along American ways, from church to church. 
The farmers are used to change and have not given 
Serious thought to permanence in the pastorate. Until 
Wwe acquire as a nation new cravings for peace and free- 
dom, there will be no large place in the United States 
for a settled pastorate in the country. Yet the promise 
is growing of a stable country ministry. It appears as 
an inspiration in the minds of many young men enter- 
ing the ministry, as a product of the economic prosperity 
of farmers themselves and as a deliberate plan of the 
church authorities. Only the last of these remains to be 
described at this point. 

The religious system we have was set up among stable 
populations of western Europe, and its forms are those 
of a people who dwell long in their towns. Yet the 
American population has been on the move for eighty 
years. New-comers from Europe have been invading 
the land since 1840; and residents of the land, children 
of the colonial settlers, have pushed westward since the 
same date, to the settlement—often not permanent—of 
new places. Since the date of the discovery of gold in 


LENGTH OF SERVICE 223 


California, in 1849, residence in the United States has 
been thought of, by most people, as impermanent. So 
many have moved that all think of moving rather 
than of staying. In such a population, churches built 
for stability have had to adapt themselves to mobility. 

American churches now represented in the country 
are of two classes: the colonial churches, and those of 
American invention. The colonial were quietly devel- 
oped in the two hundred years of slow settlement of the 
Kastern seaboard, from 1609 or 1620 to 1840. Indeed, 
if one were writing for the whole American experience, 
he should include in the statement the hundred years of 
earlier expansion of the Spanish and French Catholics 
in the sixteenth century, but their settlements have 
no great concern to the farmers of the United States and 
they are omitted here. The colonial churches were those 
founded by countrymen in the territories of the thirteen 
colonies. Their expansion was slow. The colonies, 
after the immigration of the early seventeenth century, 
increased largely by natural growth of the original 
population. No immigration overwhelmed them such 
as came to American lands after the year 1840. As the 
Eastern settlements became congested, families moved 
westward in small caravans, into the wilderness. The 
churches that were set up were no other than they had 
known in the neighborhood of Boston, New York, and 
Baltimore, and these were identical with the churches of 
western Europe. These churches are still by name the 
most representative throughout the land. In the larger 
immigration of the nineteenth century they have led 
‘the van. 


224 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


The American-made churches are another matter. 
The number of new sects does not match that of the 
colonial denominations. But in their forms of organiza- 
tion they have dominated the whole rural field. The 
eity churches adhere generally to the more thorough 
type of colonial times, which came to us from Europe. 
- But the country people have churches devised by a 
people on the move, that generally bear European names 
cherished through colonial days, but are formed on the 
model of the American-made. The difference between 
the colonial church and the American-made, though it 
goes by the same name, is scarcely less than the differ- 
ence between Catholic and Protestant. The denomina- 
tions which are unwilling to adapt their forms to the 
needs of a moving people have suffered by comparison 
with those which cared less for stability than for 
numbers. 

The history of American rural religion has yet to be 
written, but some of its outlines are sufficiently known. 
After the colonial days of slow expansion, possession of 
the wilderness became a national obsession. Life in the 
wilderness became a national ‘ideal. Isolation and self- 
subsistence were made into moral virtues. Ability to 
resist beasts, human enemies, and the accidents of life, 
and to care for oneself alone, unassisted by social 
machinery, took on the character of a new chivalry. 
Sons of colonial houses elected to join the crusade against 
the forest and the conquest of the prairies, in much the 
same spirit as their ancestors followed Peter the Hermit 
across the Mediterranean, seven hundred years earlier, 
to the redemption of the Holy Places from the infidels. 


LENGTH OF SERVICE 225 


In this new chivalry the Indians played the part once 
acted by Moslems; the Alleghany Mountains presented 
a barrier like unto the obstacle encountered in that 
earlier time in crossing the sea. It followed naturally, 
though unexpectedly, that religious ministers were 
needed by this population moved by a great ideal. They 
appeared in the great revival of the years between 1800 
and 1830. 

The book by Miss Cleaveland descriptive of ‘‘The 
Great Revival’’ is a paragraph in the annals, as yet un- 
interpreted by historians, of the American churches. 
For one cannot understand the rural church in the 
middle West, where it has its home, without reading 
the story Miss Cleaveland has begun to write. To read 
this record of a century and a quarter ago is to recognize 
the genius and to glimpse the process of the country 
church of the present time. These revivals stripped 
religion of all its garments of tradition, laid aside its 
doctrinal elaboration, divested the ministers of their 
dignity as pastors, and changed the pastorate to a cir- 
cult. The ministers were sent out into the scanty 
settlements to evangelize. The churches they formed 
were mere places of heralding, with scantiest organiza- 
tion and none of the machinery for recognition of the 
State, which had determined the form of Huropean 
churches. The country churches of the whole land have 
now, after a century and a quarter of continued insta- 
bility of their people, settled themselves to these forms 
of religion which were invented in the first two decades. 

The second large and general cause of unsettlement 
of the country people was the Homestead Act, passed 


226 THE FARMER’S CHURCH. 


in the early years of Lincoln’s administration, the force 
of which was released by the termination of the Civil 
War. The millions of men who had engaged in that 
struggle required some outlet for their restlessness, in 
all probability; and they found ready to their hand a 
law designed to distribute the national domain. Allot- 
ments of one hundred and sixty acres were offered to 
the settler on easy conditions. At once the state of 
mind of the settled people of the Eastern States was 
adjusted to the new ideal of homesteading. 

The churches which the homesteaders were to use, 
however, were an afterthought. It was only as a re- 
sult of a national movement of the older churches, 
through the boards of home missions of their several 
denominations, that this afterthought was expressed in 
houses of worship adapted to the needs of these land- 
seekers. The religious movement was made national. 
Railroads already extended across the country, the first 
in 1869; five more connected the Atlantic and the Pacifie 
by 1890. By that time swift communication between 
all parts was possible. The minister of the Mississippi 
and Ohio valleys had before this time been a circuit- 
rider, without formal supervision. He could now be 
sent out and salaried by national secretaries who had 
at command funds supplied by a thousand congrega- 
tions of prosperous Christians in the East. A national 
spirit, instead of a mere heralding of the Gospel, pre- 
vailed. The evangelization of the whole land and all 
its people was set before the eyes of the churches. 
Settlers in remote places expected it. But the church 
with which they were supplied was still a church of 





LENGTH OF SERVICE 227 


transition, adapted to the needs of a population on the 
move. 

So long as there was good land to possess under 
the Homestead Act, settlers went westward to get them 
a home upon the virgin soil. Many of these, like 
Richard Garland, moved from one place to a second, 
and even a third or fourth, in obedience to the restless 
spirit of a new country. They saw the gold under the 
Western rainbow and expected to find under prairie 
soil something better than grasshoppers and debts. 
They all expected to become gentlemen farmers in a 
decade; but after many decades they found themselves 
still moving on toward a goal unattained. For some 
the habit of moving seems to have taken the place of 
the instinct of permanence. 

By the last decade of that century the word had gone 
out that the land still in possession of the Government 
was so inferior as to require investment of capital to 
insure a crop. At once the land-seekers turned, with 
heightened interest, to the more desirable lands, and 
the price of land in the middle West began to rise. Like 
the lark rising from the ground singing, the goal of 
the American farmer flew in fascinating circles upward, 
charming the ear with melody until it was lost to sight. 
The restlessness of the country people after 1890 is 
measured by the ascending prices of land, which con- 
tinued to soar and sing until 1920. So that after 
twenty years of land-seeking, we had thirty years of 
land speculation. It would be hard to say which phase 
was the more disturbing to the farmers’ churches, 
brought first from the staid and permanent villages of 


228 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


Europe and secondly from the conservative settlements 
of the Eastern States. 

In the land-seeking movement from 1865 to 1890, nine 
States were settled and admitted to the Union. In the 
period of speculation from 1890 to 1920, the prices of 
farm land doubled many times, and by the year last 
named the price of land had passed far out of sight 
of limitation by the profit to be gotten from the land. 
For ten years before the World War, in the experience 
of farmers possessed of first-grade land in Illinois, the 
price of the land had been such that with the best of 
skill they were unable to realize five per cent. upon 
their investment. Naturally, many of them sold their 
farms and moved to other States, where a lower price 
of land gave them interest and wages for the same ex- 
ertion. 

We began in the nineties to exploit the prospects of 
wealth in the farms by the method of buying and sell- 
ing farms at an ever higher price. This speculative 
selling began in the middle West and extended by steady 
progression, like a wave, until all parts of the country 
were involved. All American farms were in 1900 
supposed by their owners to be for sale. Thirty years 
of land speculation, between 1890 and 1920, changed 
the mind of Americans in regard to land. Farm land 
was, by the alchemy of magical prices that had no basis 
in the prices of farm products, transmitted into dreams 
of gold. The only way to get the gold was to sell the 
land; so men joined the army of farm speculators. 
Farmers bought and moved, sold, bought another place, 


LENGTH OF SERVICE 229 


moved to it, and after a year’s tillage or more sold it 
again at a profit, and moved on. 

The best measure we have of this instability of the 
population is the increase in tenancy. Beginning in 
1880, when farm tenants were 25.1 per cent. of the 
whole number of farmers, the proportion increased to 
30.3 per cent. in 1900, 38.1 per cent. in 1920. The 
American farm-renter has come upon us unexpectedly. 
He has not yet been recognized in the laws of the States 
or in those of the National Government. Legislators 
who do not hesitate to enact laws to control bankruptcy, 
tariffs, obedience to the seventh commandment, and the 
proportion of alcohol in a farmer’s cider, have not yet 
acted concerning the restlessness of the farm-owner. 

In earlier times there were farm-hands in the Ameri- 
can farm-houses. But these too are transformed, by 
the expectation of what magic the farmer may do, into 
tenants. Not tenants with a lease such as European 
lands know, who are as stable as owners, but renters of 
a year, who have no status under the law and desire 
none. For they also are on the move. They work 
the rich lands until they can accumulate sufficient 
capital wherewith to purchase a small place on the 
cheaper lands. Some renters have bought in the richer 
sections where renting is profitable, and then have con- 
tinued to rent lands in addition to those which they 
own. Measured by monetary gains, the farmer who 
is ‘‘renting additional land’’ is the best-paid type of 
American farmer. 

Land requires a stable population to till it, if a highly 


230 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


organized society is to be fed and furnished. The 
domestic plants and animals, if they are to transmute 
dust of the earth into the elements of human energy 
and religious faith, require continuing care by the same 
person on the same soil. The surplus for the market 
is provided by selective breeding of plant and beast, that 
will on that particular soil and in that particular cli- 
mate and in a given market yield, as return for a 
given amount of labor and fertilizer, a greater product. 
These processes of breeding require unbroken attention 
for years. To build up a herd of Holstein cows that 
will produce an excess of market milk, without cor- 
responding increase of feed or labor, will require the 
undivided attention of a farmer for twenty years. To 
bring a whole farm to produce a large excess of those 
goods which have a margin of profit will require more 
than one lifetime. The skill that will accomplish it is 
not easy to acquire. There is no better way than to 
inherit it. The best farmer is the son of a farmer and 
grandson of a settler. In other words, farming is a 
vital attachment, not a monetary relation to the soil. 

Agriculture is a kind of consecration, of such social 
value that we intrust the farmer with possession of a 
natural monopoly. Land is of all things on which we 
put a price the most sacred. Money values are in- 
adequate as measures of its utility, because it is not 
movable and its potentialities are themselves, in any one 
year, quite beyond calculation. 

There is no land exchange in which the elements of 
price of land can be precisely estimated by expert 
brokers, as wheat or cotton can be priced. Its value in 





LENGTH OF SERVICE 231 


money, therefore, fluctuates in a market attentive to 
profit alone, so as to defy economic analysis. Human 
hopes and fears are in it, and sentiments of home love, 
ideals of moral satisfaction. These cannot be weighed 
in the same scales as beef or cotton. They require a 
social measurement because they are a part of the proc- 
ess In which belong love of brothers and love of neigh- 
bors—the highest experiences of the human spirit. The 
love of God is engaged in the feelings which contribute 
to the price of land. 

So that the instability of the rural population in 
America has religious effects. When a proportion of 
the members of a rural congregation sell their farms 
and move away, other families are weakened in their 
loyalty by the thought of moving. ‘‘ Decline in popu- 
lation engenders a psychology of defeat.’’ Plans for 
repairs or for costly investment in church equipment 
are arrested. All improvements are postponed while 
the congregation is suffering a loss of supporters. For 
there is in the Protestant creeds no adequate doctrine 
of the creative plans and in the churches no codes of 
conduct that go with those creeds, no restraint upon the 
individual by reason of his loyalty to his church. When 
he sells his farm for economic advantage, unrestrained 
by his religion, he barters away a religious value as well. 
He sells his church membership and those of his family, 
actual or potential members of the church, so far as the 
effect is concerned. 

Indeed, he does his church a worse harm than selling 
it. For the buyer is probably of another faith—so 
many are the Christian sects—and the acres once tribu- 


232 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


tary to the church of the farm-owner are now, in all 
probability, taxed to support another and competing 
church. Such changes and disturbances of the people 
whom he serves weaken the spirit of the minister. He 
too thinks of change. His ambition ‘‘for a larger field’’ 
of service stirs him to go elsewhere. ‘‘A new voice’’ 
is what the congregation needs, they think; and so the 
process of change is idealized. Preacher and people 
speak pious phrases, dimly realizing their partial in- 
sincerity. The ideal of change is a kind of moral in- 
decision between apology and aspiration which weakens 
the moral fiber of the congregation and arrests its 
growth by deadly inaction. 

For the church is like the land. It requires a stable 
population for its prosperity. Its process is the: slow 
one of growth. Churches cannot be manufactured. 
Mechanical measures do not count in their construction, 
except as useful minor helps. Materials do not make 
things of the spirit. Materials can embody and con- 
serve the spiritual things; or they may serve as obstacles 
to the spirit. Those sentiments and states of will which 
in a democracy compose the churches are easily de- 
stroyed by change of human relations. They depend for 
growth upon permanent family life and continuing 
neighborhoods. 





CHAPTER. XVIII 


THE LARGER PARISH 


and a Reformed Church in a row, on a country 

road three miles and a half in length. The Re- 
formed Church was once a part of one of the Presbyte- 
rian churches, so that they may be considered together. 
The people are of the same type, being neighbors and 
kinsfolk. One of the churches is in a village of five hun- 
dred people; the rest are in the open country. The 
country population that supports these churches is now 
being diminished rapidly by the departure of some per- 
sons for the towns, and in each of the four churches there 
are some who believe that they all should get together 
and form one strong church. With one exception they 
are all weaker than they were ten years ago. 

But the obstacles are many. There are the usual 
family preferences, kinship connections, and neighbor- 
hood antagonisms. Country people are accustomed to 
say in a ease of this sort, ‘‘There is a lot of history 
behind the question.’’ The private interests of promi- 
nent church members, the personal fortunes of some of 
them, who are disposed to maintain old enterprises dear 
to them, the remembrance of former pastors, the sacred 


associations that attach themselves to the place where 
233 


|: New Jersey there are three Presbyterian churches 


234 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


families have worshiped for generations, where they 
have buried their dead, where they have had years of 
profound joy and sorrow—these all are in the way. 
But they would seem to be insufficient reasons for hae 
ing an enterprise of such obvious worth. 

The union of these churches would seem practicable; 
but it has no foree behind it, because no one of them 
has a program different from the other. Each is a 
ehureh of preaching, worship, Sunday-school teaching, 
and activities of a women’s and a young people’s 
society. They are all of the same pattern. They differ 
a little in size and in the amount of work done or 
number of worshipers assembled. The abilities of the 
ministers differ, but they are all preachers. The zeal 
of the members for the church differs, but they are all 


‘ doing the same things. The program is one that ex- 


presses religion in words. For this program a small 
church is better than a big one. A small church enjoys 
an intensity of fellowship that a big one lacks. Each 
member has in this scanty, meager program a place 
that he can fill. The activities which are necessary to 
carry on a teaching program are ushering, the col- 
lection of money, the routine care of property, the con- 
ducting of occasional social meetings, and the giving of 
church dinnérs. There may be once a year a gather- 
ing of larger size. For a program so simple as that 
the few leading members of a small church are sufficient. 
It is better that churches which prefer to be of this sort 
be small, so long as they can get a preacher and keep 
going. 

The church in the country has always been limited 


THE LARGER PARISH 235 


by the boundaries of mutual acquaintance of neighbor 
with neighbor. Men are willing to go to church with 
those whom they meet weekly. The country churches 
have not hitherto been so extended as to include persons 
outside the neighborhood. It may be a geographic 
neighborhood, a trading neighborhood, a kinship group, 
or a population having a common language. But what- 
ever the boundaries of the small neighborhood based 
upon universal acquaintance, the church has not, as a 
rule, grown beyond it. 

If the first factor in neighborliness is acquaintance, 
the second is geographic nearness. This circumstance 
is prior to acquaintance and a cause of it, but I have 
put the two in the order they have in the rural mind. 
Propinquity necessitates acquaintance. Let us _ look, 
then, at the geographic factor. Studies of it have been 
made in recent years. Whatever the term ‘‘neighbor’’ | 
may mean to philosophers, for farmers it carries with 
it always the idea of physical propinquity. It connotes 
the persons and families who live within easy driving 
distance, or who by the habits of marketing, going to 
school or to church or lodge, are imbedded in that 
affection which dwells not in sentiment but in duty. 

I do not know who began the study of communities 
aS land-areas. The idea is old enough. The country 
parish used not to be a selected membership, but was 
made up of all persons dwelling upon a certain area of 
land. So we began to survey the churches in Pennsyl- 
vania and Illinois, in 1910, as they stood related to the 
people of a township and later those in Tennessee as 
they were located in a magisterial district. A little 


236 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


later C. J. Galpin made his more precise analysis* of 
the ‘‘trade-basin’’ of the village and its surrounding 
farms, a study as suggestive as it has been useful. It 
was used in the interchurch studies of country churches, 
under the direction of E. de S. Brunner, for the de- 
limiting of the parish. The study of the neighborhood 
has been pressed farther by J. H. Kolb? at the Univer- 
sity of Wisconsin, who has demonstrated that country 
people are bound together by services rendered one an- 
other. These successive studies taken together constitute 
a beginning of the understanding, in terms of measure- 
ment, of the rooting of the farmer’s life in the area of 
land with which he is as a neighbor associated. 

Upon this area of land his church must stand, and to 
it the services to be rendered by his church belong. The 
farmer’s church is already seeking for a land basis, as 
in the last generation it sought for a confessing member- 
ship. As it ceases to be controversial and partakes of 
a spirit irenic instead of polemical, it will ever more 
clearly see its relation to the land, to the beasts and 
plants that live upon the land, and to the human souls 
whose character is given them in large part by the 
community. We have already many churches that may 
claim to be community churches. The greater number 
of them are denominational. And beyond these the 
denominations possess surely as many more, in which the 
fact of relation to a certain area and to its people is in 


1“Rural Life,’ Charles Josiah Galpin. Century Co. 1918. 

2“Rural Primary Groups,” J. H. Kolb. University of Wiscon- 
sin Bulletin. See also “Service Relations of Town and Country,” 
Ibid. 


THE LARGER PARISH 237 


evidence though they do not profess it. Then outside 
denominations are ‘‘community churches,’’ whose ex- 
istence is justified by their ideal of serving the people 
who dwell upon an area of land. So that it is evident 
country churches are already favorable to the idea of 
serving all within a geographical boundary. 

The active social spirit of our time is at work defining 
the rural community, in ways that will have interest to 
church people when the results are more mature. Com- 
munities are formed out of hand by public-service cor- 
porations, by the government mail service, and by the 
public schools. The telephone was early appropriated 
by farmers. Central stations had to be provided. So 
the companies described an area around each telephone 
‘central’? in which all the users of telephones should 
be served from that central station. Often in the 
Eastern States a central station serves several towns. 
The unit may be only so large as will be served efficiently 
in the erection of lines, in their repair and maintenance, 
and in the service of calls. The telephone community 
is larger or smaller, according as the population is 
denser or more dispersed, as the roads are good or im- 
passable, and as the business of the company is great or 
small. A church administrator may well study the 
telephone central and ask himself whether the future 
Protestant church might not be organized upon a basis 
as broad, with a technique as flexible and responsive. 

The rural mail is delivered upon an area equally ex- 
pansive. Its radius must be no longer than a daily 
journey of motor- or horse-drawn vehicle. The state 
of the roads must be considered. The needs and de- 


238 THE FARMER’S CHURCH : 


mands of the people must be a determinant. Yet the 
Government has a system that works, delivering to all in 
the communities—as its own maps in the Washington 
office define them—a daily service. Again, could the 
service of rural religion be organized upon as broad a 
basis and give to all who dwell within its boundaries 
the comforts and warnings of the Gospel? The pres- 
ent system of small parishes may be said at the best to 
reach the individual farm-house less often than once a 
month. Would it be too much to hope that a rural 
parish, if it were centered at the hub of the telephone 
community, or at the distributing office of the rural-mail 
delivery, could by a system of visitation touch every 
farm-house once a week? To do so would revolutionize 
American religious life. But are Americans ready for 
a religion of service and use, to take the place of that 
religion of opinions and theories they have so long held 
in esteem ? 

The public-school authorities also have created their 
communities. They no longer approve the one-teacher 
school. The consolidated school with its elaborate 
building and its diversified instruction by an organized 
staff of teachers not less than four in number, appeals 
to their judgment more. In some States this type of 
school, which was conceived in Ohio, has taken the place 
of the simpler form of school dear to our fathers 
and ‘‘good enough’’ for most farmers. The district 
of the consolidated school is not identical with that 
of the telephone, nor with the routes of the mail- 
carriers. It is in well-settled farming country a district 
of about ten miles’ diameter. In the Western lands 


THE LARGER PARISH 239 


thinly settled its longest radius is often ten or even 
twenty-five miles; but this is unusual. The limit is 
again in the goodness of the roads at all seasons and 
the endurance of the children, who cannot bear too long 
a ride before and after the hours in the school-room. 
There are many religious leaders who have seized upon 
the consolidated school district as the proper physical 
basis of the church parish. They declare that there 
should be only one church in a district. 

It is undoubtedly true that the country community 
is of larger area than it was when most of the farmers’ 
churches we know were organized. Neighbors are both 
more numerous and more dispersed. Especially is this 
true in mountainous regions. In the remoter country 
places families used to be limited to those who lived in 
the valley or along a certain road; but now the greater 
facility of acquaintance by reason of better communica- 
tions and the dispersion of families and friends over a 
widened residential area have increased the area of the 
community. Friends and kinsmen used to be within call 
on foot. They are now within twenty miles. So that 
one of the bonds that unite people in churches is 
lengthened. The larger parish is made possible. 

The story of the beginnings of this new conception has 
been often told. So far as I know the pioneers were 
Harlow 8. Mills? in Michigan and Silas E. Persons in 
New York. As becomes ministers ‘of religion, they re- 


3 “The Larger Parish,” Harlow S. Mills. Missionary Education 
Movement, New York. Also the pamphlets by Malcolm Dana, 
published by the Congregational Home Missionary Society, New 
York. 


240 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


ceived from an inner moving their inspiration for this 
bold act of formal enlargement of the conventional 
parish; but about that time the elements of their con- 
ception had been in many minds less fertile and con- 
structive. Never was a proposal more timely. It has 
been the source of many imitations in the years since it 
was broached at Benzonia and Cazenovia. 

The practical mind of Dr. Maleolm Dana has directed 
the rural church work of the Congregational churches 
during recent years along this line alone. It is possible 
that he has seized upon the solution of the difficulties of 
the farmer’s church. Long ago Professor G. F. Warren 
of Cornell University declared that as the most neces- 
sary adjustment of the church to the industrialized 
farmer a church should minister to people dwelling 
upon an area large enough to support an efficient 
establishment. He declared that New York farmers 
had not sufficient income* to support many small 
churches and advised that the area of pastoral care be 
ereatly extended in the interest of more efficient service 
and better financial support. 

The instances of larger-parish organization that may 
be cited are drawn from outlying States. It may be 
doubted whether at present the more thickly settled 
States would consent to the obliteration of the many 
small conventicles, dear as they are to farmers by senti- 
ment and remembrance, and the magnifying of central 
churches at points at which the rural mail is distributed 
or the rural telephone is centered. The Roman Catholic 
churches are so organized in general, but Protestants 


4“FWarm Economics,” G. F. Warren. Macmillan. 1913. 


THE LARGER PARISH 241 


would effectually protest. In the sections, however, in 
which the church has never been firmly established, as 
western Colorado, or in which it has already decayed 
by the natural inability of the people to support many 
churches, as parts of Maine, it is possible to organize 
farm families upon the larger radius. Dr. Maleolm 
Dana has so organized Montrose and Collbran, Colorado. 
There two ministers serve a ranching population over 
a radius of ten miles and the result is satisfactory. In 
each place a minister and two assistants render service 
not only at the center, at which they live, but in every 
‘*basin’’ in which their people live. They offer in the 
school-houses a regular moving-picture service, in every 
section a recreational program; and in every section, 
also, a Sunday-school and a church are brought near to 
the people. Church membership has grown and the 
people’s attitude toward the church has changed from 
indifference to glad support. Men who were asked to 
‘canvass for the church budget had accepted, one of them 
saying, ‘‘It is no longer embarrassing to canvas for the 
church in Plateau Valley.’’ 

At Lingle, Wyoming, and in the two neighboring small 
congregations of Veteran and Fort Laramie, with 
smaller places tributary, there has been organized the 
Goshen Hole Larger Parish. The Rev. Harry HE. 
Bicksler, at Lingle, is the presiding pastor, and the 
Rev. George Woodard and the Rev. A. A. Fonken, in the 
other fields, combine their services with his in the 
pastoral care of a section of irrigated lands and semi- 
arid ranch-lands, the radius being ten to twenty miles. 
Each of these men has his own independent parish, 


242 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


and a combined effort is made in evangelistic, social, 


and educational work. They codperate also in village 


beautification. Mrs. Fickett, a trained social worker, 
cooperates with all three pastors in certain functions, 
serving especially the women on the ranches and the 
children. 

The best example of the larger parish known to me 
in an Eastern State is that in Warren County, New 
York. The smaller churches in a part of this county 
have fallen into disuse, but at Glens Falls are strong 
and vigorous churches of all denominations, the wealth 
and leadership of the county being congregated there. 
Over a segment of the county, therefore, the Presby- 
terian Church in Glens Falls has assumed responsibility. 
The assistant minister, Mr. Twitchel, maintains serv- 
ices of worship in six of these, with congregations of 
four of the greater communions. He visits the families, 
organizes their religious activities, and gives especial 
attention to maintaining the church properties. Where 
a congregation is alive, he fosters it. His own salary 
is paid from the funds of his own church, of which 
Dr. J. Lyon Caughey is pastor; and to that church go 
all benevolent gifts, as well as all accessions of member- 
ship, except in the case of a preference for the rural 
church. The result has been excellent for a term of 
five years. 

I believe that the basis of the farmer’s church must 
continue to be the acquaintance derived from residence 
upon the same area of land, marketing in the same place, 
and use of the same schools. It would seem that with 
the broadening of areas of social intercourse the area 


THE LARGER PARISH 243 


of religious activity should be enlarged. It remains for 
able and far-seeing ministers to organize the religious — 
Service of country people upon a scale suitable to the 
experience of modern life and to the extending sym- 
pathies of farmers. We have the greater areas. The 
machinery of wider organization is offered. Only the 
ministers are lacking who love the land and the life of 
the people well enough to travel country roads with 
the tidings of heaven. 

In the Northern and Hastern States the country 
minister is a pastor and lives within the same acquaint- 
ance area as the people do. But in the West and the 
Southwest no pastorate was established in the settle- 
ment of the country. The ministers have until recently 
been ‘‘on circuit.’? They now live in the villages and 
towns, away from the open-country churches they serve; 
but in any case they range over a wider acquaintance 
than their people enjoy. They have to do so in order 
to get a living by the Gospel and they have idealized 
this habit of freedom. They take pride in the friends 
they have in many places, they boast of the fact that 
their particular church is supported by the best people 
in each community to which they go; the reason being 
that their own acquaintance in any place is limited to 
the persons who entertain them. These persons are 
the most substantial members of the congregation, so 
the minister has the impression that the occasional 
banker and school principal are representative of the 
church, to which he goes for the sole purpose of 
preaching. 

There is in the ‘‘circuit system’’ of the middle West 


? 


24:4: THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


' no promise of a larger parish. The wider acquaintance 


of the minister is productive of no organized unity 
among the churches. In fact, it tends to intensify the 
competition between neighboring churches. He ~does 
not serve the people of any area, but selected lists of 
persons. For these ministers, living in the towns, ex- 
ploit the country churches to their own advantage. The 
process of which they are a part is a predatory one. 
It goes by competition. Hach man is working for him- 
self and expecting to ‘‘seek a larger field soon.’’ It 
follows that, if small churches are to be combined in 
larger parishes, the old system of non-resident, part- 
time preaching must be done away with. 

Some ministers have enlarged the parish by secur- 
ing a motor-bus for the purpose of bringing children 
and those who have no vehicles from remote parts of 
the neighborhood to the church and Sunday-school serv- 
ices. This service should be rendered by any large 
parish, but in itself is only a reinforcement of the 
churech’s program of teaching. The essential element 
in the large parish in the country must be a social pro- 
gram, which enriches the life of the people in a wide 
area but concentrates at one center the benefits of 
organization, of extensive financial contribution, and of 
rare personality. 

The possibility of the extension of a country parish 
is at the present time limited by two conditions. First, 
the ability and disposition of the minister. If he is 
ready to travel far, to seek out all the people in an area 
extending without interruption from the church to the 
country round for a radius of about ten miles at the 


THE LARGER PARISH 245 


farthest; if he is willing to make all these people his 
own, to study their needs, and to devote himself to their 
service; and if he has the ability to assemble them at 
a central point as well as to distribute valued services 
to them at their local centers, with wisdom and dis- 
eretion, then his contribution is made. 

The second condition of a larger pastorate is financial. 
It is not enough to say that ministers should go into the 
eountry: there must be an adequate, dignified, effective 
way of paying the bills for this large plan. It is ques- 
tionable whether families at a distance can be persuaded 
to eontribute effectively to a long-distance service 
centering in a meeting-house of another neighborhood. 
There must be discovered in the country, therefore, 
centers of religious work whose people are willing and 
able to finance the larger-parish service, and in these 
families there must be a readiness to give their means 
to a work beneficial not only to themselves but to others. 
It is my opinion that we are ready for this now in the 
farming areas of the middle West, of the Pacific coast, 
and of the mountain and prairie States. I do not 
think that people in the South are prepared for it. The 
colonial States of the East, which have always had the 
tradition of a rural pastorate, are ready. 

And to be ready means this: that the minister who 
loves farmers and desires a kingdom of his own will be 
supported in the country. If he has fair ability and 
knows how to get his way with men, he will have no 
difficulty in putting through a program of combination 
of small units in the country and of securing the support 
forvit: 


246 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


In the third place, the general solution of this ques- 
tion must await the arousal of village and town people 
in the regions I have named; for only in these centers 
do the neighborly interests of the open country meet. 
In the village is found a sufficient nucleus of wealthy 
families and in these smaller towns there dwell gener- 
ally persons of experience and intelligent leadership. 
It is therefore possible for a village or a town to main- 
tain a broad area of service. 

Indeed, the great overchurching of the village, which 
is known to every student of the country church, is a 
consequence of plans for rural service. In the begin- 
ning of each church in the village, its founders said that 
it was to serve the farmers. With the passage of time, 
and because there is no common control, these churches, 
obedient to a spirit which prevails in the American 
village, have forgotten the farmer; and now we have in 
the Central States, where villages are most in evidence, 
a surplus of churches in the villages, attended, as a rule, 
by few or no farmers. They are too many, they com- 
pete with one another, they have no program to match the 
zeal and efficiency of the bank or general store beside 
which they stand. 

The first cause of village conservation in religion 
is the frequency of change in the ministerial force. No 
program can survive the influence of pastors who ex- 
pect to stay one year and remain on the average but 
two. The new minister coming in receives as a rule 
nothing from the old. The perspective through which 
the minister in a brief pastorate looks upon his work 
is foreshortened ; it ends with the farthest village house 


THE LARGER PARISH 247 


and the beginning of the country road. In parts of 
the United States almost no village pastors go near the 
farmer. They know nothing about him and some of 
them care less. | 

Another cause of conservatism is the condition ex- 
tensively shown in ‘‘The Little Town,’’*® namely, that 
the village is the place of residence of many small 
persons. It is possible for men of very limited income 
to live in a village. The outer edge of the village af- 
fords house sites where ground rent is a trifle. Con- 
struction of houses is inexpensive and living expenses 
are low. Supplies of food are easy to secure, and there 
is for almost every villager some means of income. He 
lives between trade and agriculture and he can depend 
upon either. Dr. Douglass discovered the lowest levels 
of income in the agricultural population in villages. 

The predominance of women in villages also is a cause 
of conservatism, for their range of vision is narrower 
than that of men, their efficiency in detail much greater. 
The farming industry has not been made attractive to 
women by the experience of the last fifty years, so that 
the influence of the surplus women in the villages is 
thrown into the scale against service of the people on 
the farms by the ministers. 

So that the ease of the larger parish must rest for 
the present in the experience of a few of the larger, 
bolder towns, in the example of a limited number of 
foresighted pastors, and in the promotive energies of 
national church leaders. 


5“The Little Town,” H. Paul Douglass. Macmillan. 1919. 


CHAPTER XIX 


THE EFFICIENT CHURCH 


E have had many proficient country workers. 

W Rural work throughout the United States 

has been a series of emotional explosions, 
each depositing a form of religious life. Some of these 
forms are genuinely religious and some are not; but all 
of them have to be maintained. We have been forced 
in recent years by the necessities of economy, if for no 
other reason, to test the church in the country by its 
efficiency, and to raise the question whether or not, in 
common parlance, the church is making good. This is 
a disturbing question, unwelcome to a devotional spirit 
and repugnant to the sentimentalist who looks upon the 
country church as the place where he received many 
blessings. The farmer’s church is enshrined in senti- 
ment, and to raise the question of its efficiency is to 
hurt the feelings of not a few. 

In my office twelve years ago, we planned social sur- 
veys, in response to calls for help from Presbyterians 
of my own church who were confused as to the value 
and anxious about the future of their rural congregation. 
About the same time the Rev. C. O. Gill, prompted by 
the Hon. Gifford Pinchot, was surveying churches in 


Vermont, as to their attendance, membership, and contri- 
248 


THE EFFICIENT CHURCH 249 


butions. My office adopted as a test of efficiency the 
standard that prevails in Protestant churches most 
widely, namely, accessions on confession of faith. With- 
out variation this has been the test applied in the sur- 
veys made since that time, culminating in the pamphlet 
‘“Churech Growth and Decline in Ohio,’’ by Herman N. 
Morse, and the book ‘‘The Town and Country Church in 
the United States,’’ by Morse and Brunner. The studies 
made by Mr. Gill have appeared in his two volumes.* 
These studies are pursued to the limit of their meaning 
by Luther Fry in his ‘‘ Diagnosing the Country Church.’’ 

If there is a defect in these tests of efficiency, and in 
the studies based on them, it must be remembered that 
before they were made no one had attempted to measure 
the workings of the religious spirit or to weigh the 
value of religious activity. The field is clear now for 
raising the questions: ‘‘What is an efficient church? 
What attainments should we expect from a congregation 
that worships God in obedience to Jesus Christ as a 
Divine Master?’’ I have acknowledged elsewhere that 
the national church bodies can be expected to render 
a service that is valuable and necessary, but they can- 
not be expected to produce the result we need from a 
church. 

What, then, is an efficient church? This question 
must be answered in terms of American and modern 
Christianity. The confusion under which ministers 
labor is caused by the attempts to answer it in terms 
of mystical experience, historical episodes long since 


1“The Country Church” (1914) and “Six Thousand Country 
Churches” (1920), C. O. Gill and Gifford Pinchot. Macmillan. 


250 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


closed, racial prejudices that ought not to control, and 
controversial doctrines which contribute nothing to 
efficiency. A church efficient in the eyes of Americans 
will be one that grows in numbers, more than 10 per 
eent. per year; that makes an impression such as Jesus 
Christ would make upon all the people of the natural 
community surrounding it; that renders service to the 
marginal people of the natural community, like unto 
that which Christ rendered to the poor; that regenerates 
individual character and enlists persons for the Chris- 
tian ministry; and, last of all, a church that influences 
moral standards both private and civic. It is taken for 
granted that this efficiency will be denominational, or, 
if not, that the congregation will adhere to a religious 
type generally approved. 

If I seem to exalt over much the judgment of Ameri- 
ean public opinion, my first reason is that we do not 
any longer have to choose between the tradition of Rome 
in Italy, Geneva in Switzerland, The Hague in Holland, 
or Plymouth in England, as to the efficiency of the 
church. We are responsible for our own American 
judgment, just as they were when they formed the 
Catholic, Presbyterian, Reformed, Methodist, or Congre- 
gational standards of efficiency. My second reason is 
that Americans are very pragmatical. While they are 
tolerant of traditions so far as names go,—in fact, they 
expect a church to conform to their conception of 
Christianity,—religion is alive in America and we are 
living to-day. We cannot escape the test of the present 
generation. Efficiency in religion is a conception of 
the present time. 


THE EFFICIENT CHURCH 251 


Why should a church grow? Growth in numbers is 
the standard commonly required by denominations. It 
is a true standard. We are a young nation undergoing 
changes that swiftly alter the distribution of our popula- 
tion. In every community where there is a church 
there are families moving in and out. There is a com- 
petitive system which implies that some of these churches 
will perish: and others will survive. We expect a 
church that claims support and public respect to gain 
and not to lose under such conditions. Even in a 
diminishing community it is possible for a church to 
make at least a gross gain. Our earlier surveys show 
that a church failing to make a ten-per cent. gain in the 
average year is losing ground. ‘‘For the country as 
a whole just about every other church maintained an 
average gain of 10 per cent., which it is generally con- 
sidered is about the lowest average gain that offers real 
security for the future of a church in areas subject 
to such extensive movements of population.’’ ? 

The first test of efficiency is to evangelize the com- 
munity. To this end, the Sunday-school.is the available 
agent in most cases. Good evangelists are few, and 
their maximum performance is rarely attained. The 
safest and most productive way of winning families and 
individuals to church membership is through the Sunday- 
school. The Sunday-school is the modern exponent, 
in non-liturgical churches, of catechetical instruction, 
which is as old as Christianity. It suits the American 
spirit. The Sunday-school is a society: its educational 
attainments are very meager. It is to be understood 


2“The Town and Country Church,” Morse and Brunner. 


252 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


best as a cluster of age-group societies which attract 
the young into relations with the church, and win them 
to Christian confession, establishing them in intelligent 
convictions. To say that it does little in education 
is not to depreciate it. If it is an inefficient school, it 
is an efficient evangel. 

Sunday-schools should be graded even when they are 
very small, but for the purpose of grading they should 
be assembled in large units. An efficient church ought 
to have at least one hundred in the Sunday-school, to do 
good work. Therefore, I do not hesitate to advocate 
the consolidation of Sunday-schools for purposes of 
grading. Some form of written questions should be 
used in the adult classes; picture-work, hand-work, and 
practical art should be offered to the little children. 

The Daily Vacation Bible School is an extension of 
the Sunday-school work to the week-day in the summer. 
It is adapted to the vocation of the day-school, as the 
Sunday-school should generally be to the grades of the 
public school. Grading and routine, as used in the 
public school, rightly determine those of the Sunday- 
school. The Daily Vacation Bible School offers to chil- 
dren an elaborate system of hand-work along with serv- 
ices of worship, exercises in song, memorizing of Scrip- 
ture, and a joyous fellowship. One pastor asserts that 
having once used the Daily Vacation Bible School 
method, he has adopted it as the basis of his year’s work 
in the church. This is simply to say what I have said 
before in other words: that the religious teaching of 
children such as is done in the Sunday-school is the best 
kind of evangelism. 


THE EFFICIENT CHURCH 253 


But churches ought solemnly to approach a season 
of revival every year. It seems to me that the pastor 
neglects his duty who fails to summon the whole com- 
munity at least once a year to a reconsideration of the 
Christian way of life. Let the church unite with as 
many other congregations as possible and employ the 
best preacher to be secured; but let no church fail to 
solicit the attention of every one in the community to 
the essential problems of personal religion and to the 
duty of every man to give his heart to personal obedience 
to Jesus Christ in public confession of his faith. One 
reason for periodic revival effort is found in the 
seasonal experience of life, which moves us every year 
through a scale of emotion and of will, in the peculiar 
emotional habits of Americans and in the nature of re- 
ligion itself, which occupies a commanding place in 
human life. It comes into consciousness and into 
volition only on rare occasions. Such occasions return 
annually as Easter returns with the spring season. 

Another reason is that adolescents, once in their lives, 
are prepared to face religious decision, with eyes wide 
open, and to determine their answer to certain supreme 
religious questions. In the community, therefore, there 
ought to be every year an opportunity to register such 
decisions. Men do not live at their highest all the time, 
but they must not be permitted to evade the supreme 
decisions of life on those rare occasions on which the 
claims of obedience to the Almighty may be offered to 
them. There are many persons in every community, 
probably about one third of the total number, who evade 
social obligation; they can be awakened only by sweep- 


254 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


ing the whole field of social life with an imperative dis- 
turbance. This is what a revival is. Let the church 
decide how it will revive the community, but let it not 
omit to do so. 

The second test of efficiency of the church might be 
described as publicity. I do not like the word, but 
most people do. It means that the church should take 
measures to make itself known. Religion is not a thing 
to be ashamed of: there was no meanness of spirit about 
Christ or His apostles. Prophetic spirit cannot be sup- 
pressed. It claims the attention of every one. It will 
not be rebuffed or ignored. Moreover, worship itself is 
a public interest. If the priest is too diffident to make | 
it public, the profane person is not. He has no doubts, 
but has an opinion about worship and expresses it freely. 
Therefore, every church ought to make itself universally 
known. There are various ways of doing this, and we 
must not be impatient of the bad taste exhibited by 
some churchmen, such as wearing long hair, affecting a 
clerical garb, praying in the streets, or erecting a blaz- 
ing cross on the church steeple, or maintaining a vulgar 
attack upon vulgar amusements such as dancing. Such 
methods of attracting attention have questionable re- 
ligious value, it is true; but if the minds of men are 
challenged by them, and the congregation is satisfied 
with the publicity they secure, we must leave the results 
to be tested under other standards of efficiency. The 
main objective is to compel all men in the natural 
community to know that the church is there. 

I like better the methods of an annual visitation to 
every house in the area around the church; a monthly 


THE EFFICIENT CHURCH 255 


letter from the church to every family in the natural 
community; a letter from the pastor to every individual 
whose birthday he can ascertain, if he has a proper right 
to congratulate the person on that occasion; a reading- 
notice in the papers circulated in that community; an 
engaging announcement posted conspicuously before 
the church, and frequent events maintained by the 
ehurch, of such character that the community must needs 
have an interest. 

Efficient publicity is secured by all the work of a 
church, but my contention is that the minister and his 
people must lay off their diffidence, put away the self- 
conscious snobbery of believing that there is virtue in 
small numbers, or religious value in meekness and mean- 
ness, and stand before the public as representatives of 
a great public interest. Let the minister recognize that 
he is an ambassador of the greatest Power in the world; 
and when he comes before the public, let him and his 
people comport themselves as possessing a right to public 
attention. There is a balance between personal meek- 
ness and public prominence which a ‘church ought to 
maintain. Let a country minister study the traffic 
policeman in a city street for an hour: he will be healed 
of his false diffidence and learn how fit and how happy 
is the man who adorns a public service with the gesture 
and posture of a public responsibility. 

It is quite possible to be so modest as to be called to 
sit higher up and, at the same time, to claim the atten- 
tion of all. For instance, the church at Novato, Cali- 
fornia, recently invited the Catholic Church in the 
community to a combined meeting in the community 


256 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


house for the raising of funds for a Christmas celebra- 
tion. The whole community was at once enlisted. The 
entertainment of the evening was memorable: a speech 
was made for the Protestants, by a learned man of their 
faith from a near-by town, and one for the Catholics 
by one of their numbers. <A substantial fund was raised 
and evenly divided between the two churches of the 
community, the Catholic and the Presbyterian. An in- 
teresting event of the evening was the demand that the 
Presbyterian pastor make a speech. He had made all 
the arrangements for this conspicuous attack on public 
attention on behalf of the churches, but he had omitted 
to put himself on the program. When he was called to 
the platform he received an ovation. 

Father Kelly, sent as Roman Catholic priest to a town 
near Chicago, found that the people of the community 
hated Catholics. His own church had only about thirty 
members in the village, and during his brilliant pastorate 
there—which culminated in a popularity so universal 
that he was offered nomination and election as State 
senator, by the reigning boss in polities, and his sue- 
cessor was elected mayor—his membership was never 
substantially increased. He had thirty when he came 
and about thirty when he departed five years later. 

Upon his arrival Father Kelly called upon the other 
clergymen of the community, and visited all the families 
in the place, in order to assure them, he said, that he 
‘‘had not horns and a tail.’’ Then he celebrated St. 
Patrick’s Day with a dinner instead of a dance, because 
the dinner conformed to local standards and the dance 
did not. He devoted himself to community interests. 


THE EFFICIENT CHURCH 257 


He demanded tolerance for his church rather than 
labored for the conversion of Protestants. He held a 
weekly service, open to all, in order to explain what 
Catholics believed. He was amused at being told by 
the first non-Catholic who attended these popular serv- 
ices, that he ‘‘came to see the holy smoke.’’ This de- 
voted pastor made his church known to all the people. 
When he was about to depart, the Protestants collected 
a fund, to which they permitted no Catholic to con- 
tribute, and therewith purchased him a gold watch. 
I am convinced that unless the Protestant Church is 
favorably known to all Catholics, it falls short of 
evangelizing the community. For one cannot conceive 
of Jesus Christ living his life and performing his mis- 
sion without being known to all the religious parties of 
his time. 

As a third test, the efficient church will reach the 
marginal people of the community. Those are they 
who are on the edges of life. People about to die are 
marginal, for their lives are in jeopardy; so that a 
minister will visit the sick not because they are his 
church members but because they are in danger of 
death. He will regularly go down the aisles of the 
county hospital, and speak to every patient a word of 
cheer and comfort. He will know how to behave him- 
self at a sick-bed. My belief is that he will do well to 
acquire a technique for sickness and death rather than 
to trust to his wits and to his sense of humor, as too 
many Protestant ministers do. The liturgical churches 
are wise in furnishing their pastors with a formal ritual 
for ministry to the sick and to the dying. 


258 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


Young people are on the margin of life, and they 
sorely need the attention of the church. Family disci- 
pline is poor, and always was poor. Parents are chosen 
for their high office not by their proficiency as teachers 
but by biological proficiency.. It is useless to complain 
of the ‘‘neglect of the family altar’’; it never was gen- 
erally observed; much less universal. The church has 
the duty, which the family never exercised, of caring 
for the adolescent; the Sunday-school is not enough. 
Young men and women want to play as well as to learn; 
their social meetings should be encouraged and guided. 
The chureh building should have suitable equipment, 
not only such as the ladies want for cooking and eating 
together, but what the boys and girls want for meeting 
and loitering together under good auspices, for getting 
acquainted, and for laying those foundations of life 
which include marriage. 

The Rev. J. H. Gruver at Reems Creek, North 
Carolina, proposed that his manse be enlarged in order 
that his wife, an invalid, might, although confined to the 
house, serve as chaperon for the meetings of young 
people. The Rev. Paul H. Doran, in the open country 
near Sparta, Tennessee, has followed the same principle, 
and attached to his residence a big room for community 
meetings of the young people. These are instances of 
provision, despite the utmost parsimony of means, 
for sheltering the young within the church. They 
suggest the imperative necessity that the church care 
for young women and men when they are in jeopardy of 
their lives, when their character is on the margin of the 
community’s approval. 


THE EFFICIENT CHURCH 259 


The efficient church will render services to the poor 
who are without land or tools. Such people are depend- 
ent upon the community. Therefore the church ought 
to have a wise industrial approach. The tenant farmer 
in the country should be preferred to the owner, in the 
attention bestowed by the church through its leaders. 
What is done for the tenant and the hand will reach 
the whole community. There is an indirection of attack 
which a church should prefer; for indirect action is 
the true channel of religion. A pastor in the Kansas 
wheat country, seeing the despised migrants who throng 
the towns at harvest-time, seeking employment, reor- 
ganized the facilities of the community to shelter these 
men. They were sleeping on the grass in front of the 
court-house. He got them a room within the building. 
He found shelters for them in the basement of the 
churches. He opened the town hall for their enter- 
tainment. Throughout the whole wheat country, in 
the face of the general custom of ignoring these 
men on whom the harvesting of the wheat depends, 
his example made a profound impression. It com- 
mended the church to owners and to public officials. 
To them the harvest hands had seemed merely ‘‘a 
menace’’; to him these men were first objects of the 
church’s care. 

The efficient church, in the fourth place, will regen- 
erate individuals. I do not now mean convert them; 
nor do I by the expression ‘‘regenerate’’ refer to the 
mysterious act of God, which is not under the control 
of any church, by which a soul is mysteriously changed 
from sinner to saint. I have in mind the power of the 


260 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


congregation to make a man stand on his own feet and 
be somebody. It was my highest satisfaction as a pas- 
tor to see the change in individual characters, wrought 
by membership in my church in some instances, more 
often by election to a responsible position and the per- 
formance of a public trust in the church. Every church 


produces its own type of men, we are told, but a church > 


that has developed only a crabbed old deacon, zealous 
to suppress and to obstruct, can hardly be called a suc- 
cess. The especial efficiency of a Protestant church, with 
its fiexible system of electing officers and employing in- 
dividuals, should take form in the discovery of many 
kinds of men who can perform public service and take 
pride in it. 

This is the use of the church organization. It ought 
to be more widely extended than it is. JI remember well 
breaking down the prejudice of a church I served, in 
which no man had been elected to office before that time 
who could not lead in prayer. We had one man who 
gave the church his service as a carpenter and we elected 
him to the highest church office we had. He became an 
elder, than which we have no higher honor. He never 
had much to say except about practical things, materials, 
the value of the day’s work, repairs, and the proper use 
of church buildings, but upon these subjects he became 
our authority. We had a high-church theory of the 
sacredness of the building, and he became our priest in 
the use of sacred materials. 

We had another man who was gifted in business trans- 
actions, but could rarely be persuaded to mumble a 


——_— 


THE EFFICIENT CHURCH 261 


prayer in public, though he did his best. Him, too, 
we elected to be one of our elders and he sanctified the 
office, because in that church we were experiencing a 
consecration of incomes to the Lord. It seems to me 
that every church ought to be a place for making good 
citizens, honest lawyers, and devout scholars. If so, 
the church must broadly consider the evangelizing of all 
sorts of lives.and the development of personal character 
in many human callings that have worth and are neces- 
sary to the commonwealth. 

The efficiency of the church ought to express itself 
in the call of some to the Christian ministry. This is 
an old test, but a good one. If the church cannot re- 
produce itself, it is sterile and barren. Priests are 
necessary if there are to be parishioners, and prophets 
must be called by God’s Spirit if there are to be con- 
gregations. Indeed, the prophetic spirit is necessary to 
the continuance of the democratic State, so that a church 
among farmers must not forget its highest office—to 
“send men into the ministry,’’ and women too. For 
now the woman has an enlarging place in Christian 
work, in charity organization, in health service, and 
in religious education. The divine eall will not be 
heard in a congregation that is popularly organized, un- 
less in the heart of the church is a group of praying 
people, and in the service of the church there is a pro- 
found spirit of worship. The church may be broad as 
you please, but unless it is profoundly moved to wor- 
ship, I do not think it will send its sons into religious 
callings. Is it too much to ask that, once in every ten 


262 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


years, out of the experiences of a church of two hundred 
members, there should be one young man or one young 
woman moved with a divine eall to a religious vo- 
cation? 

The efficient church will provide the community with 
moral sanctions. American churches are so prone to 
do this that I will not expand upon it. We like to 
dominate, and a spirit of Moses, the law-giver, is abroad 
in the land. It is well that it should be so, because we 
Americans are a new people, not long out of serfdom 
and slavery, and we sorely need at least ten new Com- 
mandments. We are getting them rapidly. The 
American church is, moreover, turning its mind toward 
international standards of morality. The splendid 
service rendered by the churches in foreign missions has 
prepared us for this day of international discussion. 
We have many advocates in high places of the moral 
sanctions proper to a nation about to serve as a leader 
among the people of the world, and a nation resolved to 
abstain from national greed or imperial domination. 
This is the great duty before the churches of America, 
in obedience to the spirit of Moses. If we ean only 
magnify the place of the church in its relation to the 
conscience and make less than we now do of dictation 
by the church to law-givers, we shall serve efficiently the 
needs of the time. 

The seventh kind of efficiency is denominational. I 
am convinced, after observing many congregations, that 
nothing is gained by mongrelizing the Methodist 
church with independency, or adulterating Baptist 





THE EFFICIENT CHURCH 263 


efficiency by the control by a bishop. The best thing 
a church can do is to be what it professes. Therefore 
a congregation ought to serve the communion to which 
it belongs; or, if it be an independent church, it should 
sturdily exercise its freedom. Having launched upon 
a career, it ought to have pride and self-respect enough 
to go on to the end. Denominations are the best re- 
ligious agencies we have at the present time. We can- 
not administer our work now in the light of the past, 
which is dead and gone; or of the future, which is little 
more than guesswork. Every congregation ought to 
do its duty by its own genius. 

This means that it ought to pay strict attention to the 
electing of officers, and transacting business at the 
annual meeting, which is customary in the great majority 
of Protestant churches. It ought to obey and conform 
to the usual requirements of the organization to which 
it belongs. The minister should learn to answer letters; 
church officers should be patiently trained to perform 
the duties assigned them. 

None of the great communions actually forbids its 
church to be efficient in the community. Every one of 
them proposes to make its congregation serve the people 
in developing personal character, in the time bestowed 
upon exercises of the church, in the breadth of mind and 
the lively sympathies with which they respond to the 
spirit of Christ, in use of the missionary proposals of 
their national leaders. The definitions we inherit are 
simple, and I know of no communion in the United 
States that might not reinforce its members in what 


264 THE FARMER’S CHURCH 


Micah proposed: ‘‘To do justly, and to love mercy, 
and to walk humbly with thy God’’; or what Saint 
James, the brother of our Lord, taught: ‘‘To visit the 
fatherless and widows in their affliction,’’ and to keep 
oneself ‘‘unspotted from the world.’’ 


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